The Book:
Zaki Shirazi returns to Lahore to celebrate the wedding of his cousin and childhood companion Samar Api (who has finally, it seems, found her Amitabh). Home is not what it used to be; Musharraf is in power, there has been a boom, and Lahore seems to have seen 'too much too soon'. Zaki's estrangement, amidst the flurry of wedding preparations in the house he grew up in, takes him back to his past: his childhood as a fatherless boy growing up in a household of outspoken women, and his and Samar's intertwined journeys from youth to adulthood.
As children, they often attended dangerous political protests with Zaki's journalist mother. Surrounded by the mysterious talk of adults, only Zaki seemed to share his older cousin's yearning for the perfect world. Inspired by American soaps and Bollywood films that they watched together, their world held the promise of all sorts of forbidden love. Then, when Zaki supports one of Samar's romantic schemes, the family suffers the disastrous consequences. But as his fate diverges from Samar's, he comes to understand the world around him better, and to cherish the bonds that survive the tugs of convention, time and history.
The Author:
Ali Sethi was born in Lahore in 1984 and grew up there. In 2002 he left to attend college in the United States and graduated in 2006. He has since written reviews and articles for several publications, local and international, and has co-produced and narrated a documentary on student politics in Pakistan. He lived in New York City for a year and now lives in Lahore where he is making music.
"With this first-rate first novel, Sethi joins an ever-expanding roster of gifted young Pakistani writers, who, after graduating from Western universities, have returned home with an urgent need to explain their misunderstood country to a global audience. Through three generations of a Lahore family, Sethi charts the tumults within Pakistani political and social life since partition in 1947, including the regular vacillations between military rule and feeble attempts at democracy. Though distinctly restrained, Sethi's prose evokes the comic mislocutions of Jonathan Safran Foer and the vertiginous mania of Zadie Smith. But he is often less interested in providing a social critique than in interpreting juvenescence, which seems no different on the Indian subcontinent than it is here. Zaki Shirazi, the book's narrator, grows up in a household of women--his conservative, disenfranchised grandmother; a head-strong mother who advocates sweeping societal change through the magazine she edits; and his teenage cousin, who fasts only for the purest reason: to get the boy. Zaki presents these characters' engaging histories, along with his own youthful searches for acceptance, the undulations in their lives echoing those in Pakistani society. By juxtaposing references to American pop culture ("The Wonder Years," Mariah Carey) with, say, the machinations of arranged marriages, Sethi exposes the essential friction of life in modern Pakistan. Even local karaoke bars reflect the country's uncomfortable middle ground, offering songs "too new for nostalgia and not new enough to stir up the excitements of the present." -- The New York Times
'The Wish Maker, in Ali Sethi's mature and sure-handed prose, is an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and an illuminating look at one of the world's most turbulent regions. Ali Sethi steadfastly resists the usual clichés about both Islam and his native country. Instead, he offers a nuanced, often humorous, and always novel look at life in modern day Pakistan'
-Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
'The Wish Maker is a confident and personal debut. Ali Sethi's is a fresh voice from a new generation of Pakistani novelists'
-Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
'Reaching from a Massachusetts college to a restless Pakistan. The Whish Maker is a brilliant example of the new global novel and a sad but sometimes funny song about the way we live now'
-Gary Shteyngart, author of the Russian debutante's handbook and absurdistan
