Broken Verses

A Pakistani woman finds a new clue to her mother’s long-ago disappearance in this “thoroughly captivating”novel by the award-winning author of Home Fire (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan’s greatest poet, had been beaten to death by government thugs. Now, in present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple’s private code—a letter that could only have been written recently.

Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother’s disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan’s first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina’s who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother?

Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

“There is a succulent pleasure to the narrative that draws you happily to its end.”—The Guardian

“All of Shamsie’s novels are deeply moving and morally complex, leading to the kind of rich reading experience most of us hope for in every novel we pick up.” —San Francisco Chronicle