You Can't Go Home Again

Linked stories draw a powerful portrait of young Pakistan at home and in the worldA group of teenagers in a Karachi high school put on a production of Arthur Millers The Crucible-and one goes missing. The incident sets off ripples through their already fraught education in lust and witches and over the years the young men and women grow up together and apart haunted by both home and djinns in these lyrical linked stories. In the world of Sarvat Hasins contemporary seekers young rakes move between Murree and New York and women own the magic of their inexplicable passions; a failed soap opera star forms a poignant truce of a marriage with an unlikely man who has his own scars; churails are a persistent spectre in the most modern of lives. Here is the real Pakistan of Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie one generation younger-and a young storyteller to take on the legacy of Pakistans chroniclers.