Book review: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam
For a country that has featured so heavily in major news events in my lifetime, I have read very few books set in Afghanistan. The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam is not only set in Afghanistan, it also covers many of those same major world events. I adored his first book Maps For Lost Lovers and this was his follow-up.
It’s shortly post-9/11. Marcus is an English doctor who has spent most of his life living at the edge of a village near Jalalabad. His progressive, outspoken Afghani wife Qatrina was murdered by the Taliban. Now the Taliban have moved on from the area but two local warlords are sparring for control. A disparate group of people find their way to Marcus’s house. He, meanwhile, is mainly waiting for news of his daughter Zameen who disappeared during the Soviet invasion. Or if she hasn’t survived, perhaps he can at least find the son she is rumoured to have had.
Continue reading “Book review: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam”
Like the best literary novels, 
For about six months now I’ve been subscribing to the 
In my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of 
I’ve never read The Odyssey, but for my degree I had to study James Joyce’s Ulysses, which involved a couple of lectures detailing how it follows the structure of Homer’s classic. I’ve intended ever since to give The Odyssey a go but 20 years have passed now. I suspect the closest I will come is modern reworks, including those that tell just part of the story. And the best I’ve read so far is Ithaca by 
Over Christmas and New Year I had almost two weeks off work, so I thought I’d power through four or five books. I’d wrap up cosily from the world in chunky knits and soft blankets; move from bed to sofa to rocking chair; interrupted only by dog walks and meal times. Ha! I think I forgot that Christmas is also a time for trying to see all the family and friends for quality time. And that’s lovely, but does mean despite the truly terrible weather keeping the dog walks short, reading time was also short.
The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by 
I am not a big fan of the novel-within-a-novel device. Invariably I find the secondary narrative either too dull or too abstract to keep my attention, and my interest is only held by the primary story. I found it a little odd, then, that the opposite happened with The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.