The Return of Faraz Ali

Aamina Ahmad

Sent back to his birthplace - Lahore's notorious red-light district - to hush up the murder of a child prostitute, a man finds himself in an unexpected reckoning with his past.Not since childhood has Faraz returned to the Mohalla, in Lahore's walled inner city, where women still pass down the profession of courtesan to their daughters. But he still remembers the day he was abducted from the home he shared with his mother and sister there, at the direction of his powerful father, who wanted to give him a chance at a respectable life. Now Wajid, once more dictating his fate from afar, has sent Faraz back to Lahore, installing him as head of the Mohalla police station and charging him with a mission: to cover up the violent death of a young kanjari.It should be a simple assignment to carry out in a marginalized community, but for the first time in his career, Faraz finds himself unable to follow orders. As the city assails him with a jumble of memories, he cannot stop asking questions or chasing down the walled city's labyrinthine alleyways for the secrets-his family's and his own-that risk shattering his precariously constructed existence.Profoundly intimate and propulsive, The Return of Faraz Ali is a spellbindingly assured first novel that poses a timeless question: Whom do we choose to protect, and at what price?

BOLD REACH: Already in this debut, Ahmad displays a kinship with novelists like Mohsin Hamid and Viet Nguyen in her ability to invoke major moral and political themes-corruption, sexual exploitation, the traumas of colonization-via the personal dramas of her characters, never at their expense. Her ambition will make a splash.EVOCATIVE SETTINGS: Unfolding in a turbulent Pakistan of the late 1960s and 1970s, with flashbacks to north Africa during World War II, the story brilliantly captures the texture of lives unspooling amid the swirl of forces larger than themselves.CHARACTERS IN THE ROUND: The story is told from a few points of view, via characters as profoundly sympathetic as they are flawed: Faraz; his sister Rozina, the kanjari who got away-a searing portrait of a woman thwarted and warped by circumstance; his powerful father, who is haunted by demons of his own. We feel for them all.FAMILY TIES: Keenly observed, universal family relationships set a psychologically suspenseful plot in motion and keep us emotionally riveted: a distant father and the son he can't quite embrace, protective mothers and rebellious daughters, siblings who never give up on each other, a lifeless marriage that begins to awaken when the truth is told.