Contemporary Authors

• Animal Medicine ( stories) Oxford University Press (Karachi, Pakistan), 2001
• The 786 Cybercafe Alhamra (Islamabad, Pakistan), 2004
• Blessings and Other Stories Alhamra (Islamabad, Pakistan), 2007
• Slum Child Tranquebar Press (Chennai, India), 2010
• A Season for Martyrs Speaking Tiger (New Delhi, India), 2016

1. A season for martyrs https://lccn.loc.gov/2017351314 Shah, Bina, author. A season for martyrs / Bina Shah. New Delhi : Speaking Tiger Publishing, 2016.©2014 284 pages ; 20 cm MLCS 2018/50176 (P) ISBN: 9789386050304 (eISBN) 2. Slum child https://lccn.loc.gov/2010347781 Shah, Bina. Slum child / Bina Shah. Chennai : Tranquebar Press, 2010. 288 p. ; 21 cm. MLCS 2011/01159 (P) PR9540.9.S47 ISBN: 9789380658315 3. Blessings and other stories https://lccn.loc.gov/2007378756 Shah, Bina. Blessings and other stories / Bina Shah. Islamabad : Alhamra, 2007. 163 p. ; 22 cm. MLCS 2007/02650 (P) ISBN: 97996951617219695161723 4. The 786 cybercafe https://lccn.loc.gov/2004343926 Shah, Bina. The 786 cybercafe / Bina Shah. Islamabad : Alhamra, 2004. 315 p. ; 22 cm. MLCS 2005/00353 (P) 5. Animal medicine https://lccn.loc.gov/2001310094 Shah, Bina. Animal medicine / Bina Shah. Karachi : Oxford University Press, 2001. 106 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. MLCM 2001/00079 (P) ISBN: 0195791037

• Before She Sleeps - 2018 Delphinium, https://smile.amazon.com/Before-She-Sleeps-Bina-Shah/dp/1883285763/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1538105648&sr=8-1&keywords=Shah%2C+Bina

• Amazon - https://smile.amazon.com/Before-She-Sleeps-Bina-Shah/dp/1883285763/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1538105648&sr=8-1&keywords=Shah%2C+Bina

  Bina Shah is a writer of English fiction and a journalist living in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories, including Slum Child, which was a best seller in Italy. A regular contributor to the International New York Times, she is a provocative and bold commentator for the international press on Pakistan’s society, culture, and women’s rights. Her most recent novel, A Season for Martyrs, originally published by Delphinium in 2014, was published in France and India in 2016. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an alum of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa.

• Bina Shah - http://www.binashah.net/

  About

  Bina Shah is a Karachi-based author of five novels and two collections of short stories. Her previous novel, A Season for Martyrs, was published in the US, France, and India to critical acclaim, while her forthcoming feminist dystopian novel, Before She Sleeps, will be published by Delphinium Books in August 2018. A regular contributor to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, and a frequent guest on the BBC, she has contributed essays and op-eds to Granta, The Independent, and The Guardian, and writes a regular column for Dawn. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa. She is currently the president of the Alliance Francaise de Karachi and works on issues of women's rights and female empowerment in Pakistan and across Muslim countries.

• Sangat Review - http://www.sangatreview.org/blog/2016/03/16/bina-shah/

  Bina Shah
  Bina ShahBirth—
  Where—Karachi
  Raised in—
  Education—B.A. in Psychology from Wellesley College and M.Ed in Educational Technology from Harvard
  Currently—Karachi
  Bibliography

  A Season For Martyrs Delphinium (2014)
  Slum Child, Tranquebar Press (2010)
  Blessings (2007)
  The 786 Cybercafé (2004)
  Where They Dream in Blue Alhamra Publishing (2001)
  Animal Medicine, was published (2000)

  Bina Shah is a writer of English fiction and a journalist living in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She is a regular columnist for the International New York Times, the Dawn, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and has written for the Independent and the Guardian. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published in Granta, Wasafiri, the Istanbul Review, Bengal Lights, Asian Cha, and Critical Muslim.

  Shah’s first book, a volume of short stories called Animal Medicine, was published in 2000. Her first novel, Where They Dream in Blue, was published by Alhamra in 2001. A second novel, ‘The 786 Cybercafé’ was published by Alhamra in 2004. In 2005, “The Optimist”, a short story written by Bina was published in an anthology called And the World Changed (Women Unlimited/OUP); an essay called “A Love Affair with Lahore” was published in an anthology edited by Bapsi Sidhwa called City of Sin and Splendour – Writings on Lahore (Penguin India – Pakistani title Beloved City – OUP). In 2007 Alhamra published her second collection of short stories, Blessings.
  Shah’s third novel ‘Slum Child’ was published in India by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland-Tata, in 2010. An Italian-language version was also published in Italy by Newton Compton in 2009 under the title La Bambina Che Non Poteva Sognare, where it reached number 3 on the paperback bestseller list,[3] and sold over 20,000 copies. It was published in Spanish by Grijalbo, an imprint of Random House Mondadori, in June 2011.

  Shah’s fourth novel, A Season For Martyrs, was published by Delphinium Books (November 2014) to critical acclaim. It was also published in Italy by Newton Compton as Il Bambino Che Credeva Nella Liberta in 2010. For this novel, Shah was awarded the Premio Internazionale in the Un Mondi di Bambini category of the Almalfi Coast Literary Festival in 2010 for translated fiction.

  A Season for MartyrsA Season for Martyrs
  Bina Shah
  The success of Bina Shah’s previous novels has depended largely on their fast-paced, high-stakes plots, sympathetic Karachiite characters drawn from the city’s ordinary echelons and underclasses, and their contemporary settings and thematic relevance. Such works include The 786 Cyber Cafe (2004),

• Revolvy - https://www.revolvy.com/page/Bina-Shah

  Bina Shah is a Pakistani writer, columnist and blogger living in Karachi.
  Education

  The eldest of three children, Shah was born in Karachi to a Sindhi family. She obtained a B.A. in Psychology from Wellesley College and a M.Ed in Educational Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA.[1]

  Shah is a fellow of the University of Iowa, as an alum of the International Writing Program (2011).[2] She is also a Fellow of the Hong Kong Baptist University as an alum of its International Writers Workshop.[3]
  Media

  Shah is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She has been published in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Danish, Chinese, German and Vietnamese. Her novel Slum Child was published in 2008, while a historical fiction novel about Sindh, A Season For Martyrs was published in 2014 by Delphinium Books.[4] Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Granta, The Independent,[5] Wasafiri, Critical Muslim, InterlitQ, the Istanbul Review, Asian Cha, and the collection And the World Changed.

  Shah has been a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times[6] and an op-ed columnist for Dawn,[7] a newspaper in Pakistan published in Karachi. Currently she also writes a column for the Books and Authors section of the Dawn. She has written for Al Jazeera[8], the Huffington Post[9], the Guardian[10], and the Independent[11].

  Shah writes extensively about Pakistani culture and society, women's rights, girls' education, and issues pertaining to technology, education, and freedom of expression. Her columns and her blog The Feministani has established Shah as one of Pakistan's foremost feminists and cultural commentators.[12] She has been a frequent guest on the BBC,[13], PRI's The World[14] and NPR.[15]

  Shah is a two-time winner of Pakistan's Agahi Awards for excellence in journalism.[16][17] Her short story "The Living Museum", won the Dr. Neila C. Sesachari prize from Weber University’s literary journal, Weber - The Contemporary West. Shah donated the award money to The Karam Foundation in aid of Syrian refugees.[18]

  Shah was chosen by OK! Pakistan as Best Writer of 2014.[19] In 2017 she was selected as a Ponds Miracle Woman. [20]
  Books

  Shah's first book, a volume of short stories called Animal Medicine, was published in 2000. Her first novel, Where They Dream in Blue, was published by Alhamra in 2001. A second novel, The 786 Cybercafé, was published by Alhamra in 2004. In 2005, "The Optimist", a short story by Bina, was published in an anthology called And the World Changed (Women Unlimited/OUP); an essay called "A Love Affair with Lahore" was published in an anthology edited by Bapsi Sidhwa called City of Sin and Splendour - Writings on Lahore (Penguin India - Pakistani title Beloved City -— OUP). In 2007 Alhamra published her second collection of short stories, Blessings.

  Shah's third novel Slum Child was published in India by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland-Tata, in 2010. An Italian-language version was published in 2009 under the title La Bambina Che Non Poteva Sognare by Newton Compton Editori in Italy, where it reached number 3 on the paperback bestseller list,[21] and sold more than 20,000 copies. It was published in Spanish by Grijalbo, an imprint of Random House Mondadori, in June 2011.

  Shah's fourth novel, A Season For Martyrs, was published by Delphinium Books (November 2014) to critical acclaim. It was also published in Italy by Newton Compton as Il Bambino Che Credeva Nella Liberta in 2010. For this novel, Shah was awarded the Premio Internazionale in the Un Mondi di Bambini category of the Almalfi Coast Literary Festival in 2010 for translated fiction.[22]

  A forthcoming feminist dystopian novel, Before She Sleeps, will be published by Delphinium Books in 2018.[23] An extract from the novel was featured in the Dawn's special 70th anniversary Pakistan edition "Seventy+Seventy".[24]
  See also

  List of Pakistani writers

  References

  "On: Bland Food, Binders, and Being Outspoken". Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah", IWP.
  "Announcement @ HKBU Library". library.hkbu.edu.hk. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "A Season for Martyrs". Delphiniumbooks.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah" at The Independent.
  "Bina Shah" at The New York Times.
  "Bina Shah" at Dawn.
  "Bina Shah". Aljazeera.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah - HuffPost". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah". Independent.co.uk. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 15 October 2017. Retrieved 14 October 2017.
  Bina Shah (27 September 2013). "Bina Shah on BBC World News". Youtube.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah". Pri.org. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "A Rare Win For A Woman Stabbed By A Stalker In Pakistan". Npr.org. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Values and Ethics Celebrated at AGAHI AWARDS". Abbtakk.tv. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Awards for excellence in journalism". Agahi.org.pk. 12 November 2014. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah's "The Living Museum"". Karamfoundation.org. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Log In or Sign Up to View". Facebook.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "Bina Shah". Ponds.com.pk. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  "In conversation with Bina Shah", Wasafiri,
  Official website. Retrieved on 2 August 2010.
  "Publishers Marketplace: Joseph Olshan". Publishersmarketplace.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
  Shah, Bina (13 August 2017). "SEVENTY + SEVENTY: EXCERPT: THE GIRLS OF GREEN CITY". Dawn.com. Retrieved 15 October 2017.

  External links

  Bina Shah's official website
  "How I Came To Write A Dystopian Novel about Life for Women in South Asia" from the Delphinium Books blog
  Interview with Bina Shah for Asian Threads, RHK Radio
  "Bina Shah: On Bland Food, Binders, and Being Outspoken" from Ed., the HGSE alumnae magazine
  "Pakistan and the Literary Boys' Club" from The Guardian
  Bina Shah's Amazon Page

• Gogi Bytes - http://gbytes.gsood.com/2007/06/27/interview-with-bina-shah/

  nterview with Bina Shah
  27 Jun
  Author editor

  Bina Shah, a Wellesley and Harvard alumna, is a noted Karachi based author, journalist, editor, and blogger. She has published two novels and two collections of short stories. Her first collection of short stories, Animal Medicine, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999. The collection was followed by a well-received novel, Where They Dream in Blue, that cataloged the return of an expatriate to Karachi. Ms. Shah currently edits the Alhamra Literary Review along with Ilona Yusuf.

  Biographical

  How was it growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s under Zia-ul-Haq?

  Weird and tense. I remember the day Bhutto was hanged. I was only five but everyone was terrified that there would be some sort of reaction. And there wasn’t. The streets were quiet. Later, I remember “Black Days”, but I didn’t understand what they were about. I touched on those days in my short story 1978 in Blessings where this young boy grows up in the Zia era—the feeling of being out in some sort of wilderness physically echoes what it felt like in this country back then.

  You have spent a fair amount of time in the US. You spent your early years in Virginia and then upwards of five years in Massachusetts getting educated, first at Wellesley and then at the School of Education at Harvard. Can you tell us a little more about your time in the US?

  Those were the years that formed me. From zero to five, you are absorbing everything and understanding how the world works. Getting your initial programming, so to speak.

  When I returned for college and graduate school, it was a time of great freedom, of experimentation, trying my wings. The contrast between a sheltered upbringing in Pakistan and being in the hothouse environment of a Boston education couldn’t be greater. Both of those times in America made me who I am today.

  Can you tell me a little more about your parents? What took you and your family to Virginia and what brought you back? What was their attitude towards your choice of profession?

  My father was a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, and that is why we went there. We came back when he completed his studies, five years later. My parents are many things to me. They were young when they had me, and in a sense, the three of us have grown up together. They challenge me in ways that nobody else does; they are supportive of me but they will never let my head get too big. My mother, particularly, is good at deflating my ego! They are extremely pleased that I have turned out to be a writer because they see how happy it makes me. My dad always said I should be a writer and he never lets me forget that he was right. :)

  What was your experience like attending an all women liberal Liberal Arts college in Massachusetts?

  Absolutely fantastic! I would send my daughter there in an instant. You have your whole life to spend with men; you only get four years to spend it in an all-women environment. The amount of support, the building of self-confidence and self-esteem is unrivaled anywhere else. It was a very special time.

  Your book Where They Dream in Blue deals with an ABCD’s visit to Karachi. How much of the book parallels your own journey? How hard was it for you to readjust to Karachi when you came back from the US in the 1990s? Can you tell us about some of the challenges?

  The book attempts to deal with the questions that any person visiting their homeland would feel, especially Pakistanis who were raised in America. The questions that a Pakistani raised in Britain would have might be slightly different, but I think there are some things that apply to everyone. Certainly, I grappled with many of those questions myself. Adjusting back to Karachi in 1995 was nowhere near as difficult as adjusting to it in 1977 when the differences between the two countries in terms of culture and environment were far different. In 1977, there was nobody like me—a person who’d been raised in America. In 1995, there were starting to be lots of kids like me, who had gone for school there and come back. However, the challenge was the same here as it would have been for any young adult attempting to re-enter the real world after college: what am I going to do with my life?

  You began your career as a Features Editor for Computerworld in 1996. That is fairly early in terms of the web revolution, and even the Computer revolution when it comes to Pakistan. Can you tell us a little more about the technology ‘scene’ in Pakistan at that time and how it has evolved in the past decade?

  The technology scene in Pakistan was it its embryonic stages. The Internet had just come to Pakistan that year, and those of us who had been in America and used email got really excited about the Web and what it meant. People who were based here, especially traditional sorts of businesses, were suspicious and terrified of the new technology. So you had pockets of great understanding – we were like this little team, spread out across the country but keeping in touch through email and being astronauts in a way: “the Internet, the brave new world and then the larger landscape of resistance. But like they say in the space movies “resistance is futile”. Now everyone’s using technology in much the same way they were using it in the United States around, say, 1999. Mobile phones are part of that boom, by the way. We could be doing more – applying technology more to our everyday lives, rather than making an effort to integrate Blackberries and Wifi, it should all fall into place naturally – but it is always going to be that much more of an effort here.

  Authorship

  The heroes of both of your novels, Where They Dream in Blue, and The 786 Cybercafe, are men. Arati Belle, in her review of Animal Medicine, writes, “Curiously, she seems to get into the skin of the boy in this story than any of the girls in the other stories” in reference to the story ‘Going Fishing.’ Was it a deliberate choice on your part to use male protagonists?

  Yes, it was a deliberate choice. When you are starting out with your writing, the last thing you want is for everyone to ask you, “Well, is this about you?” Making the protagonist a man was the easiest way I could think of to sidestep this question, which gets very annoying to answer after the twentieth time.

  The other reason for using men as protagonists is that there’s a practical consideration: in this society, men simply have more access to certain situations and locations than women do. I don’t like it, but it is true. How many women of a middle-class background do you know who would be able to set up a cybercafe on Tariq Road? So I bring women into the narrative, but then I try to highlight their positions/situations in society.

  This is going to change in my next novel, in which the protagonist is a young girl. But she comes from a level of society in which she can slip in and out of various places because she is the poorest of the poor, and they have more liberty in many ways – at least at that age – than a middle or upper-class woman in Pakistan. If that sounds like a paradox, it is.

  “In the novel, there is room for poetry, for tenderness and violence, for description and investigation, for analysis and synthesis; there is room for the portrayal of the countryside and of characters and of non-characters. That is, the man from within and from without.” Camilo Jose Cela, Nobel Prize-winning Spanish author once said in an interview when asked about the novel. Do you agree with what he says? What do you think is the range of the novel as a medium? What are its limitations?

  I had to look up the novel in my Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms to answer this question. The great strength of the novel is its freedom from limitations: style, structure, length, content. It is like this form that can absorb and make its own all the other literary forms around. If there are limitations to the novel, they exist in the limitations of the writer. A bad writer is going to write a bad novel, sure, but even a very good writer can be limited by her own limitations of experience, geography, knowledge of other disciplines, lack of worldview, and so on. The novel really challenges you to dig deep within yourself as a writer and bring out everything you know. It will totally exhaust you as a medium if you are not up to the challenge.

  There are a variety of novels – the intellectual novel in the vein of Joyce and Rushdie, an elemental novel or the simple novel, the kind of novel written, for example, in the style of Dickens, or Balzac. (Cela) And then there are of course myriad hybrids. You, to me, have crafted two elemental novels. Firstly, do you agree with the statement and if so then can you tell us a little more about what went behind the choice?

  Yes, I agree with your statement. My first two novels were very simply written. I think I simply was not ready to write a very intellectual novel. I was young, I was inexperienced, and I was not confident. I had a story and I wanted to tell it. I did not feel entitled to comment upon the state of the world at large because I had seen so little of it, in my opinion. I wanted to concentrate on my stories and my characters, and do a good job of that; I felt I owed that to the reader first and foremost. My own theories could wait till I had figured out what they were. Why inflict that on my reader?

  Most authors are trying to write their psychological autobiographies and failing to write them honestly. Their inability to come to terms with their own ghosts, their psychological traumas, and their inability to forgive themselves and others, often creates perversions that surface in the form of misplaced viciousness with which they deal with some characters. They are also trying to ‘understand’ the world and often ‘fail’ to understand it. Let me provide an example to illustrate the point. You listed Of Human Bondage as one of your favorite books in one of your interviews. The book is also a great favorite of mine. My friend Chaste recently provided a wonderful analysis of a facet pertinent to the question and I paraphrase his analysis here- Philip Carey’s character is largely autobiographical with his club foot a substitute for Maugham’s stutter and closet homosexual status. Then there is Mildred, a common shop girl, who declines in status every time we meet her anew – from a struggling shop girl to a prostitute with syphilis. Chaste argues that Maugham uses Mildred’s debasement as a way to come to terms with the trauma that he had to suffer from at the hands of his peers. He transfers all of that angst onto a working-class girl than the middle-class women, at whose hands he most probably suffered. Can you comment briefly on the unduly broad statement with which I start this question by first pruning it and then analyzing it?

  For me, writing is a therapeutic process, not to try and heal the writer of any psychological demons, but to understand the world around them in some way. By writing about issues, especially ones that bother me, that nag me, that are complex and not easily categorized or understood, I grapple with them and eventually arrive at a better understanding of them. As for being vicious towards a character, that is an odd thing to do. As a writer, I have love for all my characters, even the ones that aren’t particularly likable, because they are my creations. I try to make them play out the complexities of life that I see going on in the real world, not the ones in my head.

  Can you now answer the question that I raise above with regards to your novel, The 786 Cyber cafe, that in the words of one of your prior interviewers is “centered on a story based on the infamous ‘other side of the Clifton bridge.” In response to which you said, “I think people on this side of the bridge are more narrow-minded in many ways.”

  People are hemmed in everywhere by their preconceptions and prejudices. Just because you are rich and you are educated doesn’t mean you lack those preconceptions and prejudices. Nor does being rich or educated make you any more open-minded or tolerant. I believe the rich, the elite, those that live on “this side of the Clifton Bridge, which is a bridge that connects the richest parts of Karachi, Clifton and Defence, to the rest of the town on the Saddar side and beyond – think that their intellectual work is done once they have gotten their college degrees and taken the reins of their fabulous destinies as the nation’s leaders. Intellectually they are some of the laziest people I have ever seen: content to expound forever on whatever theories they formulated thirty years ago, without taking in anything else and considering whether their views are outdated or inapplicable today. When you are hungry, in all sense of the word, you stay humble. And humility goes hand in hand with open-mindedness: the ability to realize that your view is only one of many, and only an opinion at best.

  Both of your novels and your current collection of stories have been published by Alhamra Publishing. And you edit Alhamra Literary Review along with Ms. Yusuf. Al-Hamra in Arabic simply means “the red”. It is of course usually used to describe the 13th Century “crimson castle” or Alhambra in Granada. Do you see the name ‘Al Hamra’ as an apt title for a Literary Review or for that matter a publishing house based in Karachi? And if so, why?

  You would have to ask the publisher, Shafiq Naz, what was in his mind when he chose that name. I think he wanted to capture the idea that the Islamic world and Europe once had a rich, intertwined history in Moorish Spain. Literature is part of that cultural tradition. Maybe it is an oblique association. Going back to a time when art and literature and poetry was very grand and respected by kings and emperors. It is a good vision for a publishing house.

  What is your vision for the Alhamra Literary Review?

  We want to encourage Pakistanis to write; we showcase their talent and creativity. I would like to foster a future Booker Prize winner. That is my vision.

  Karachi

  The late nineties were a tumultuous time for Karachi with MQM boycotting elections, political turmoil, and violence. Karachi has again recently been in the grip of a maelstrom. In the interim the number of Afghans has multiplied, Karachi beach has suffered a major oil spill, the political alliances have turned topsy-turvy, and the economy has sputtered on. Can you talk briefly about the past ten years in the political life of Karachi?

  I am not comfortable commenting on politics, so I will take a pass on this question.

  Since you are an author, it would be interesting to raise this question with you. I have traveled to Pakistan twice and extensively toured the cities of Lahore and Karachi. I came across some good bookshops but alas not a great one. Should I have searched more or is the bookshop scene really that modest? (Mayank)

  The Liberty Books chain is doing great things for Karachi; they’ve brought the best of English publishing to the country, although at high prices. But I don’t really know how to get around that issue. I always find their bookstores a pleasure to be in; they are relaxing, inviting places, the staff is knowledgeable and helpful, and they’re working on promoting Pakistani writers with their new Book Club, which has hosted some fairly well-received launches of books, including my own. But a country like Pakistan really needs to have several excellent sources in each city for sourcing and obtaining books, and not just in the English language. Right now you have to really hunt for good literature. One day there will be a better bookshop culture, I am sure.

  Every great city leaves some an imprint on the work of its writers. How has Karachi contributed to your writing?

  I would think that is fairly obvious from my work!

  Being a young Pakistani writer who writes about young people, how would you chronicle the changing values of the urban youths in the country? Is it difficult to strike a balance between the Islamic heritage and the McDonald culture? (Mayank)

  It is not a case of ‘either/or’. It is a case of ‘and’. Understand that and you have understood the young people of Pakistan. They want choices. They do not want restrictions. But they want to choose both options, not to have to choose between them. This is the strength of Pakistani people of all ages: they are open to everything, influences from the East, the West, from Islam, from America, from Britain, from India. We are like big sponges and we are hungry for all of it. We absorb it all and then we distill it into something that is unique to us. I think that is magical and it should not be contained in any way.

  Just following up on the title of your novel, “Where the dream in blue” – what color would you pick to describe Karachi? What color would be the dreams of Karachites?

  Again, that should be fairly obvious! These days, however, I think the color of Karachi is brown. There is a lot of dust and mud and construction going on here.

  Karachi has a multiplicity of cross-cutting ethnic and class cleavages – Sunnis Vs. Shias, Muhajirs Vs. Natives Vs. Afghans, Urdu speakers Vs. Punjabi Vs. Sindhi Vs. Pashto, rich vs. poor etc. Add to all of this a military, whose role according to Ayesha Siddiqui’s new book runs deep within the economy. What is the prognosis for its future?

  Oh God, you are really asking me the easy questions, aren’t you? Karachi will survive everything. We already have. We will go on. Underneath everything, the people of Karachi want two things: to make lots of money and to be happy. To achieve both, you have got to get along with everyone else. We know how to do that, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  Picking Favorites

  Which is the last great book by a Pakistani author that you enjoyed? (Mayank)
  The two books I really enjoyed most recently are anthologies: And the World Changed edited by Muneeza Shamsie and Beloved City edited by Bapsi Sidhwa. I am sorry I cannot give you a book by a single author. These ones were fantastic just for the sheer variety of good writing between two sets of covers.

  You maintain a personal blog. What are some of the other blogs that you like visiting? (Mayank)

  From the ridiculous to the sublime: a variety of friends’ blogs, including Jonathan Ali’s Notes from a Small Island, Greg Rucker’s Glossophagia, Jawahara Saidullah’s Writing Life, and the Second Floor’s blog (that’s the coffeehouse that I frequent). Then there are some gossip blogs I have to go to every day, but I won’t name them here because it’s too lowbrow and I am supposed to be this great Pakistani writer. I enjoy the PostSecret site. I like Anglophenia from BBC America. I used to go to Miss Snark, the Literary Agent every day too, but she closed that one down.

  Where do you get your news?

  I heard it on the grapevine, where else? Just kidding!

  ————————————————
  The interview was conducted via email. Some of the questions and answers have been edited for style and content. Questions ending with ‘Mayank’ were posed by Mayank Austen Soofi.

  Interview (pdf) with Camilo Jose Cela from which the quotes were drawn.

• Goji Bytes - http://gbytes.gsood.com/2007/06/28/interview-with-bina-shah-part-2/

  QUOTED: "Karachi is my inspiration. I couldn’t have been a writer in any other city in the world. Maybe I could now. Like a soldier going into her first battle, I’ve gotten my basic training in Karachi. Karachi is where the stories are. I am a bit of an amateur psychologist and never have I seen another city where people behave in the most contradictory ways. And yet when you examine their motivations and their thought processes, you come up with some amazing insights and illuminations about the human race."

  Interview with Bina Shah – part 2
  28 Jun
  Author editor

  Bina Shah is a noted Karachi based author, and journalist. This is a follow-up interview.

  In the response to the question about the choice of male protagonists in your novels, you noted, “This is going to change in my next novel, in which the protagonist is a young girl. But she comes from a level of society in which she can slip in and out of various places because she is the poorest of the poor, and they have more liberty in many ways, at least at that age, than a middle or upper-class woman in Pakistan. If that sounds like a paradox, it is.” Your observation reminded me of a passage in Ms. Sidhwa’s novel, The Bride, “Miriam, reflecting her husband’s rising status and respectability, took to observing strict purdah. She seldom ventured out without a veil.”

  I think what you say is largely right and something which anthropologists have commented on earlier. They argue that it is the necessity of going to work etc. for the lower class that causes these somewhat lax attitudes. What is your take on the issue? Can you also comment briefly on how economics defines culture? Of course, we have heard all about it through the Friedman patented McDonald’s angle that tackles cultural change via globalization. But can you talk about it from a different angle? And how do you deal with it in your own work?

  You won’t see women in the rural areas in purdah. They cover their heads with their dupattas and that is the end of it. They have to go out into the fields and work, and you can’t do that in a purdah or a burqa or a hijab. Some of our women-related cultural rituals and habits are affectations or posturing—making a statement about who you are, or who others think you should be, a very considered statement. Real culture comes more naturally; you don’t have to think about adopting it because you live it.

  In response to the question about the ‘type’ of novel—elemental versus Intellectual—you said, “I had a story and I wanted to tell it. I did not feel entitled to comment upon the state of the world at large because I had seen so little of it, in my opinion… My own theories could wait till I had figured out what they were. Why inflict that on my reader?” I perhaps misstated my point about elemental novels for they often have do have opinions and critiques woven in. I certainly think that your novels have implicit critiques, and at least amorphous theories. In fact, I find it impossible that a novel can be absent of ‘comments upon the state of the world’. Perhaps the ‘type’ is more appropriately consigned to the creative process. For instance, I have little doubt that Naipaul first had the ‘idea’ of denigrating revolutionary leaders before he wrote ‘guerillas’. On the other hand, the vicious ‘pettiness’ of everyday life manifest in ‘The House of Mr. Biswas’ seems very much a peripheral part of this sort of unvarnished descriptions. Perhaps I am wrong here and the ‘vicious pettiness’ was indeed a deliberate point. Even if it was deliberate, it was still very clearly made. So is the faux distinction that I draw about types of novels about intentionality? Can you comment briefly on this? And can you talk more about how you craft your own work?

  For me, the story always comes first. The social critique comes as I am writing the story. The characters deal with certain situations, and if it is appropriate to comment on society at large because of what they’re going through, then I do it, but I really try hard to weave it in to the narrative rather than taking a big aside that goes on for pages and comments very obviously and loudly on that aspect of society. I’m always sensitive to what sounds natural and what is very obviously the author taking over the narrative, imposing her own voice on the voice of the characters – to me that is very intrusive and distracting and ultimately weak writing.

  In response to the question soliciting your comment on whether most ‘authors are trying to write their psychological autobiographies and failing to write them honestly’, you intriguingly started with the phrase, “For me, writing is a therapeutic process”. Was that false start a ‘cousin-of-Freud’ Freudian slip? The point that I was trying to make was that our own histories sometimes make it hard to look at the world objectively, especially in a personal (and seductively powerful) medium like novel that allows, in fact, urges, a novelist to say more or less what s/he wants. Additionally, I think that novelists don’t use the novel to ‘understand the world’ but use it for delivering what they understand about the world.

  I meant what I said when I wrote that writing is a therapeutic process. But not therapy for the writer in terms of her own psychological traumas – therapy for the writer as a person existing in a world, a universe, that is difficult and heartbreaking and joyous and eleventeen layers of complex; and coming to terms with all the multiplicities and the multitudes in that world, that universe. There are people that use the novel to exorcise their own demons, certainly. But I will stand by my assertion that novelists write novels to understand the world. When you’re writing or you’re undertaking any sort of artistic project, the process of creation is one that continues throughout the entire span of the project. It’s not that you think and think for five years and you formulate your theories and only then do you put pen to paper and what emerges is fully formed. As you write, your mind keeps working, your theories keep developing. Every day of writing my novel was a new day of discovery, of mental exercises and challenges and expansion and growth. I grew as a person as a result of writing my books. I learned what I knew about the world and what I didn’t. I understood my limitations and where I needed to go in order to overcome them.

  Karachi

  Can you talk about how Karachi has influenced your writing?

  You are not going to let me get away from that question, are you? Karachi is my inspiration. I couldn’t have been a writer in any other city in the world. Maybe I could now. Like a soldier going into her first battle, I’ve gotten my basic training in Karachi. Karachi is where the stories are. I am a bit of an amateur psychologist and never have I seen another city where people behave in the most contradictory ways. And yet when you examine their motivations and their thought processes, you come up with some amazing insights and illuminations about the human race. It is like a big…what’s the word I am looking for? a cauldron, a test-tube, a type of crucible…where the best and worst of humanity are all thrown together and the results are unpredictable, sometimes horrible, sometimes heartbreaking, but always amazing. I chronicle those results. That is the sum total of all my endeavors as a writer.

  —————————-
  This follow-up interview was conducted via email. Questions and answers have been edited for style and content.

• Pride of Pakistan - https://www.prideofpakistan.com/detail-who-is-who.php?name=BinaShah&id=591

  Writer of English fiction and a journalist, Bina Shah was born in Karachi, in 1972 to a Sindhi family and was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Karachi. She obtained a BA in Psychology from Wellesley College, USA and an M.Ed in Educational Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA. Her humorous writing, political satire, and clear-eyed view of social issues have earned her critical praise and a devoted following amongst Pakistanis all over the world.

  She has served as the editor for Computerworld Pakistan and Spider Magazine, both well-known IT publications in the fledgling Internet industry. At the same time, she began to write extensively for other Pakistani newspapers, including the Dawn, Libas, the Friday Times, and the Pakistani Web site Chowk. Her humorous writing, political satire, and clear-eyed view of social issues have earned her critical praise and a devoted following amongst Pakistanis all over the world.

  She is a regular columnist for the Dawn and the Express Tribune, Pakistan’s major English-language newspapers, and has also contributed to international newspapers - International New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and the International Herald Tribune and international journals Granta.com, Wasafiri and Critical Muslim. Bina is a fellow of the University of Iowa, having taken part in the International Writers Programme at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2011.

  Bina is the author of five novels and two collections of short stories. Her 2008 novel Slum Child was a bestseller in Italy. She has been published in English, Spanish, German, Urdu, Danish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Italian. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Granta, The Independent, Wasafiri, Critical Muslim, InterlitQ, the Istanbul Review, Asian Cha, and the award-winning collection And the World Changed. Her humorous writing, political satire, and clear-eyed view of social issues have earned her critical praise and a devoted following amongst Pakistanis all over the world.

  Bina Shah's first book, a volume of short stories called Animal Medicine, was published in 2000. Her first novel, Where They Dream in Blue, was published by Alhamra in 2001. A second novel, 'The 786 Cybercafé' was published by Alhamra in 2004. In 2005, 'The Optimist', a short story written by Bina was published in an anthology called And the World Changed (Women Unlimited/OUP) and an essay called 'A Love Affair with Lahore' was published in an anthology edited by Bapsi Sidhwa called City of Sin and Splendour, Writings on Lahore (Penguin India - Pakistani title Beloved City, OUP). In 2007 Alhamra published her second collection of short stories, Blessings.

  Bina Shah's third novel 'Slum Child' was published in India by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland-Tata, in 2010. An Italian-language version was also published in Italy by Newton Compton in 2009 under the title La Bambina Che Non Poteva Sognare, where it reached number 3 on the paperback bestseller list and sold over 20,000 copies. It was published in Spanish by Grijalbo, an imprint of Random House Mondadori, in June 2011.

  Bina Shah's fourth novel, ‘A Season for Martyrs’, was published by Delphinium Books (November 2014) to critical acclaim. It was also published in Italy by Newton Compton as Il Bambino Che Credeva Nella Liberta in 2010. For this novel, she was awarded the Premio Internazionale in the ‘Un Mondi di Bambini’ category of the Almalfi Coast Literary Festival in 2010 for translated fiction.

  Bina’s fifth novel, Slum Child, is the story of a young Christian girl who chases her dreams all the way out of the slum and into the richest neighborhood of Karachi. It was published in Italy under the title La Bambina Che Non Poteva Sognare (The Little Girl Who Could Not Dream), and will be published in Spanish in early 2010.

  Bina’s short stories have been included in several anthologies and writing Web sites. Her short story, “The Wedding of Sundri”, was featured on the Indian web site Women’s Writing and published in the anthology Neither Night Nor Day (HarperCollins India). “The Optimist” was featured in the anthology And The World Changed (Women Unlimited, OUP, and The Feminist Press), an award-winning collection of short stories by Pakistani women writers. “The Angel of Jalozai” was published in the bimonthly journal of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, while “The Good Wife” was published in the German literature journal Literatur Nachrichten. Bina’s essay “A Love Affair with Lahore” was featured in Bapsi Sidhwa’s anthology Beloved Lahore (also published as City of Sin and Splendour in India).

  Bina lives in Karachi, where she also teaches writing part time at SZABIST. She is involved with the arts and culture scene, writes and speaks on women’s issues, and has done readings at the Second Floor, Karachi’s most well-known alternative coffeehouse and bookstore. She enjoys travel, practices yoga, plays the flute and piano, and loves dogs. Bina Shah was chosen by OK, Pakistan as Best Writer of 2014.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/bina-shah

  Bina Shah became a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times in the fall of 2013. Ms. Shah is a fiction writer and journalist in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of four novels — “Where They Dream in Blue,” “The 786 Cybercafe,” “Slum Child” and “A Season for Martyrs” — and two collections of short stories. Her work has been published in English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Urdu, Sindhi and Italian. She writes a monthly column for Dawn, the largest English-language newspaper in Pakistan, and a blog, 21st Century Woman. She has contributed essays to The Guardian, The Independent, the literary magazines Granta and Wasafiri, and the journal Critical Muslim.

• The Feministani - https://thefeministani.com/about/

  About
  IMG_1327 (Medium)
  picture by Wahaj Alley

  Bina Shah is a Pakistani-based writer, novelist and NYT columnist. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She is a regular columnist for the International New York Times, the Dawn, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and has written for the Independent and the Guardian. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published in Granta, Wasafiri, the Istanbul Review, Bengal Lights, Asian Cha, and Critical Muslim.

  Books

  Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, forthcoming, 2018)
  A Season For Martyrs (Delphinium Books, 2014)
  Slum Child (Tranquebar, 2010)
  Blessings and Other Stories (Alhamra 2008)
  The 786 Cybercafe (Alhamra 2004)
  Where They Dream in Blue (Alhamra 2001)
  Animal Medicine (OUP 2000)

  Columns
  The New York Times
  Dawn
  Al Jazeera
  The Huffington Post
  The Guardian

  The Buzz about Bina

  “Riveting and articulate, A Season for Martyrs by Pakistani journalist Bina Shah is the author’s debut novel for an American readership and clearly denotes her ability to deftly craft and complex story of suspenseful twists and unexpected turns that holds the reader’s total attention from beginning to end. Very highly recommended for personal reading lists.— Buzzfeed, “10 Amazing Female Novelists Under 50”

  “History and memory have long fingers that reach into the present and beyond and in A Season for Martyrs Shah’s characters navigate that tenuous space between worlds beautifully.” – The Toronto Review of Books

  “With Bina Shah’s excellent writing and her skill as a storyteller, A Season for Martyrs becomes a haunting, memorable homage—to Sindh, to Bhutto, to the unnamed martyrs of a beautiful land.” – New Indian Express

  “We suspect she will continue to inform, inspire and – most importantly – bring her two worlds, Pakistan and America, together.” – India.com

  “A complex and captivating novel” – Asialyst.com

  “Shah writes with grace and fluency, and it is clear from the start that her book reflects a maturity in style and skill at plot-management that are the hallmarks of the seasoned writer. Shah writes about her native soil as only an insider can. What gives the novel additional warmth and luster is the manner in which she portrays legendary Sindhi heroes.” — Midwest Book Review

  “Good reading, urgently and cleanly told, for those interested in world events, as well as issues of identity and place in community.” — Library Journal, “Top Indie Fiction for Fall 2014”

  “Bina Shah is an admirable writer” – BAPSI SIDHWA, author of Cracking India

  “Listen to the voice of Bina Shah–you will hear a young, confident, compassionate new Pakistan” – PROFESSOR AKBAR AHMED, author, playwright, poet, and Chair of Islamic Studies at American University

  “Shah’s novel is both fascinating and eye-opening.” – Publishers Weekly

  “Shah writes with grace and fluency” – Muftah.org

  Representation

  Bina is represented by Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates.
  https://thefeministani.com/about/

QUOTED: "One can't help wishing the novel had roamed a bit more wildly within this inventive premise."

Shah, Bina: BEFORE SHE SLEEPS
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Shah, Bina BEFORE SHE SLEEPS Delphinium (Adult Fiction) $25.00 8, 7 ISBN: 978-1-88328576-0
Characters attempt rebellion from a dystopian society that replenishes its female population with forced polygamy and childbearing.
Deep underneath Green City, a group of women live in secret in the Panah, a structure that allows them to evade their fate as wives and mothers strictly controlled by the government. After a virus wiped out a large number of women and wars decimated the region--which roughly encompasses what is current-day Pakistan and Iran--they rebuilt by requiring women to marry multiple men, undergo fertility treatments, and be educated as "domestic scientists." But the women of the Panah have resisted and make their livings as consorts to the male leaders of Green City. Rather than sex, these women offer nocturnal companionship, usually simply by sleeping next to their clients and holding them. Lin, the leader of the Panah, believes they are safe from discovery after years of her careful planning and personal risks. But when Sabine, one of the Panah girls, turns up in a hospital, nearly dead from an ectopic pregnancy she has no memory of conceiving, all the secrets of both the Green City elite and the rebels are imperiled. Pakistan native Shah (A Season for Martyrs, 2014, etc.) has written a novel that is in explicit conversation with The Handmaid's Tale, and though Shah's society is emphatically secular, situating her narrative in a predominantly Muslim area of the world is an overdue enlargement of the cultural conversation that Atwood's novel continues to provoke. But Shah's novel, which blends the spy genre and soap opera with speculative fiction, isn't really the feminist dystopia one might expect. None of the female characters are allowed emotional independence: Each one's love for a man drives her decision- making.
One can't help wishing the novel had roamed a bit more wildly within this inventive premise. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM
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"Shah, Bina: BEFORE SHE SLEEPS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723400/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0fa9ee45. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723400
2 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

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Before She Sleeps
Publishers Weekly.
265.23 (June 4, 2018): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Before She Sleeps
Bina Shah. Delphinium, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-1-88-328576-0
Nuclear war and disease have ravaged the world in this haunting dystopian thriller from Pakistani author Shah (A Season for Martyrs). In Green City, capital of the Sub-West Asia Region, the few remaining women have become breeding commodities forced to have multiple husbands. Despite repression, some women rebel and found an alternate community, the Panah. These women go out at night, hidden under veils and covered in gold powder preventing their DNA from being detected on scanners, to provide nonsexual intimacy to high government officials, who crave being held. Among the rebels are Lin, kidnapped when she was seven by an aunt who groomed her to become the Panah's ruler, and Sabine, who seeks refuge from Green City after her father arranges an undesirable marriage for her. Reuben Faro, the head of the governmental ruling body, is in love with Lin. He protects the Panah, aware that he will be punished severely if discovered. Lin, Sabine, and Reuben become enmeshed in perilous and treasonous conduct that draws in innocent bystanders. Will the three survive? Fans of The Handmaid's Tale won't want to miss this one. Agent: Jessica Wollard, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Before She Sleeps." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242846/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=736d0762. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242846

QUOTED: "Complex, vivid, thoughtful and thought-provoking, A Season for Martyrs is very highly recommended."

3 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

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A Season for Martyrs
Helen Dumont
MBR Bookwatch.
(Feb. 2015): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
A Season for Martyrs
Bina Shah
Delphinium Books
PO Box 703, Harrison, NY 10528
Meryl L. Moss Media Relations http://www.delphiniumbooks.com
9781883285616, $14.95, 288pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Ali Sikandar is assigned to cover the arrival of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader who has returned home to Karachi after eight years of exile to take part in the presidential race. Already eager to leave for college in the U.S. and marry his forbidden Hindu girlfriend, Ali loses a friend in a horrific explosion and finds himself swept up in events larger than his individual struggle for identity and love when he joins the People's Resistance Movement, a group that opposes President Musharraf. Amidst deadly terrorist attacks and protest marches, this contemporary narrative thread weaves in flashbacks that chronicle the deep and beautiful tales of Pakistani history, of the mythical gods who once protected this land.
Critique: "A Season for Martyrs" is the debut novel of journalist and New York Times op-ed writer Bina Shah who draws upon her experience and expertise as a native of Pakistan to craft a truly memorable work of literary fiction. Complex, vivid, thoughtful and thought-provoking, "A Season for Martyrs" is very highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library General Fiction collections. It should be noted that "A Season for Martyrs" is also available in a Kindle edition ($10.99).
Helen Dumont Reviewer Dumont, Helen
4 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dumont, Helen. "A Season for Martyrs." MBR Bookwatch, Feb. 2015. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A403448348/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=4a95cbe5. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A403448348
5 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

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Fiction with a warning on
subjugation:Before She Sleeps
Bina Shah and Cris McCurley
Socialist Lawyer.
.79 (June 2018): p46+. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shah, Bina, and Cris McCurley. "Fiction with a warning on subjugation:Before She Sleeps."
Socialist Lawyer, June 2018, p. 46+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A551689286/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=65c8f802. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A551689286
6 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

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Before She Sleeps
Internet Bookwatch.
(Aug. 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Before She Sleeps." Internet Bookwatch, Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553627840/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=fb87384e. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553627840
7 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
A Season for Martyrs
Small Press Bookwatch.
(Dec. 2014): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Season for Martyrs." Small Press Bookwatch, Dec. 2014. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A394181374/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0a7fd710. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A394181374
8 of 8 9/27/18, 10:29 PM

"Shah, Bina: BEFORE SHE SLEEPS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723400/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0fa9ee45. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018. "Before She Sleeps." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242846/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=736d0762. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018. Dumont, Helen. "A Season for Martyrs." MBR Bookwatch, Feb. 2015. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A403448348/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4a95cbe5. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018. Shah, Bina, and Cris McCurley. "Fiction with a warning on subjugation:Before She Sleeps." Socialist Lawyer, June 2018, p. 46+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A551689286/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=65c8f802. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018. "Before She Sleeps." Internet Bookwatch, Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553627840/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fb87384e. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018. "A Season for Martyrs." Small Press Bookwatch, Dec. 2014. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A394181374/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0a7fd710. Accessed 27 Sept. 2018.

• News 18
  https://www.news18.com/news/books/book-review-40-440287.html
  Word count: 617

  QUOTED: "It's a lovely, honest, refreshing story - the sort that deserves to made into a movie some day. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but anyone who observes people, is curious about human feelings and human struggle, won't come away disappointed."

  Bina Shah's 'Slum Child' is a compelling story
  This book isn't a copy of anything, it stands for itself.

  Jaimon Joseph | http://jaithemonUpdated:January 24, 2012, 6:57 PM IST
  Bina Shah's 'Slum Child' is a compelling story
  This book isn't a copy of anything, it stands for itself.

  Judging by the title - I thought it was some kind of a copy of Slumdog Millionaire. But BIna Shah's a Pakistani writer and that made me curious. Turns out the book's about a Christian girl in a Pakistani slum. I'm Christian myself and that's what finally made me sit down and read the entire thing. I'm quite happy I did.

  This book isn't a copy of anything. It stands for itself and is a compelling story. I don't know what sort of person Bina Shah is or what sort of life she leads but from her descriptions of the slum that Laila, her chief protagonist lives in and the thoughts that flit in and out of her pre-teen head - it seems like Bina knows this place. That she's either lived in one, or interacted closely with slum children.

  I grew up in an unauthorized area in a quasi-village on the outskirts of Delhi. An area where residents would illegally tap electricity from the mains, where there'd be huge pools of squishy filth after every rain, where packs of stray dogs would chase the garbage man, where packs of kids would fight in the streets and outsiders wouldn't venture after dark.

  Yet, a place just twenty minutes away from the order and beauty of the army's cantonment area, about an hour away from the richest, flashiest malls in the capital. So, yes the book did ring a bell. It's effortless almost unconscious descriptions of its surroundings, its mental painting if you will, was something I haven't come across in many books from the recent past. Vivid. Immediate. And believable.

  Even more believable was a young Christian child's struggle in balancing the beliefs and teachings of her own home, with what she comes across at school and among neighbors. Christianity and Islam come from the same roots and the same ancient beliefs. Yet, they diverge dramatically on a bunch of crucial topics - differences strong enough to trigger wars around the world and in Laila's slum, strong undercurrents of suspicion and resentment.

  So yes, Laila's an outsider, struggling to understand her own place in the world. She stumbles into the life of another outsider, a drug addict and vagrant. Interestingly, he's of African descent, apparently there are many like him in Pakistan. They either migrated or were trafficked from central Asia many thousands of years ago.

  Meanwhile, Laila's family turns upside down, her father abandons her, her sister passes away, her mother suffers a nervous breakdown. In the midst of all this turbulence, tiny Laila suddenly grows up, from a scrappy school kid to a woman who knows her own mind.

  It's a lovely, honest, refreshing story - the sort that deserves to made into a movie some day. It might not be everyone's cup of tea - but anyone who observes people, is curious about human feelings and human struggle, won't come away disappointed.

  Slum Child; Written by: Bina Shah; Published by: Tranquebar Fiction; Price: Rs. 295

  bina shah

• Dawn
  https://www.dawn.com/news/614592
  Word count: 809

  QUOTED: "With a net cast so wide, and with no real narrative to back it up with, Shah’s effort at trying to write a definitive novel describing what a young Christian girl faces in the slums of the metropolis gets lost among the one-liners and the attempt to cram everything about Pakistan in little less than 300 pages."

  FICTION: A view of the slums
  From InpaperMagazineMarch 20, 2011

  IN the past few months, author Bina Shah has responded to criticism that was not equipped to write Slum Child because she didn’t travel in public transport with “I’ve been in a rickshaw!” Prior to that, she griped in various newspapers about how only Pakistan’s male authors had made the literary headlines of late, making it a literary boys club of sorts.

  After reading Slum Child, it seems that the reason Shah has not achieved the kind of literary success that her peers have is because of her writing.

  The novel begins with the character Laila, a Christian child living in one of the slums of Karachi, where at the age of nine, she has faced and seen all — a dying sister, heroin addicts, a stepfather, sexual harassment, religious divides and then the divide between the rich and the poor, and her coming of age.

  Slum Child is far too ambitious — in attempting to encompass everything from human rights to the economy, the author fails to leave us with a lasting impression of even one of the issues that the characters face.

  Then there is the writing. While Shah manages to prevent the reader from losing interest (which might be because she throws so many thoughts at them that they get confused) the metaphors she uses simply confound one. An example:

  “The blood frightened me. It wasn’t dark like my menstrual blood, which, six months after it had first begun, was still brown and patchy, like the stripes of a malnourished tiger…”

  “The stripes of a malnourished tiger” is perhaps the oddest and most repulsive description one has ever heard of menstrual blood. While creativity is to be appreciated, perhaps Slum Child would have benefited more if the same creativity had been utilised in the plot rather than random thoughts that leave one groaning.

  While the narrative attempts to touch on far too many topics, one that Shah does justice to is the description of the death of Laila’s sister, a turning point in the life of the protagonist and her family. Jumana’s slow death from tuberculosis reminds readers of just how many children like the fictional character meet death at the hands of a non-existent healthcare system or a “spiritual” healer.

  Among the more interesting characters is Haroon the Makrani, and all memories of Rushdie’s Haroun aside, one wishes his life had been explored in more detail. In Slum Child’s cast of characters, Haroon is by far one of the redeeming factors of the novel — at least initially.

  The prose is flat, and at times one begins to wish that Shah had chosen a more convincing age for her character. At age nine, Laila is one of the most grown up characters you are likely to have ever come across. The voice of the child is lost and it feels as if a far older person is using Laila as a vessel for their thoughts. Shah uses Laila to express the background of the blasphemy law and describe the differences between the elite and the poor of Pakistan. The social commentary could have been better articulated and woven into the narrative.

  The climax of the novel has an interesting twist, although it is extremely unbelievable, even for fiction. By the end of the novel, it seems Shah herself is tired. The novel comes to its conclusion so suddenly (although not a moment too soon for the reader) that one wonders if Shah had been instructed to keep her book at less than 300 pages. It is, to quote a dialogue from a Bollywood film, “Everything gets better in the end. Happyz Endingz.” All the loose ends are rapidly tied up and so neatly that it lends an air of incredulity to the conclusion.

  With a net cast so wide, and with no real narrative to back it up with, Shah’s effort at trying to write a definitive novel describing what a young Christian girl faces in the slums of the metropolis gets lost among the one-

  liners and the attempt to cram everything about Pakistan in little less than 300 pages.

  The reviewer works as a freelance journalist

  Slum Child By Bina Shah (NOVEL) Tranquebar Press, India ISBN 9380658315 288pp. Rs595

• Dawn
  https://www.dawn.com/news/1148083
  Word count: 1296

  QUOTED: "The novel as it is currently composed is more a series of vignettes which serve to punctuate rather than profoundly connect with the more accessible, contemporary narrative of a young Pakistani’s journey from political alienation to hazy enlightenment."

  COVER STORY: A Season for Martyrs by Bina Shah
  Madeline Amelia ClementsDecember 01, 2014

  THE success of Bina Shah’s previous novels has depended largely on their fast-paced, high-stakes plots, sympathetic Karachiite characters drawn from the city’s ordinary echelons and underclasses, and their contemporary settings and thematic relevance. Such works include The 786 Cyber Cafe (2004), in which a young Pakistani man’s entrepreneurial dreams and the virtual worlds of internet sex and online faith rub shoulders, and Slum Child (2010), a gripping story about a young Christian girl’s guilt-fettered attempts to escape her mother’s breakdown and the likelihood of falling prey to paedophilia and enforced prostitution.

  In comparison, A Season for Martyrs (2014) is an altogether more expansive and compositionally challenging project, of the kind one might expect a writer to attempt as her career and her command of the craft matures. In this ambitious novel Shah endeavours to interweave episodes from Sindh’s feudal, poetic, pir-enthralled, and anti-colonial past with a story which encompasses the personal aspirations and political activism of the province’s sons and daughters in the much more recent present, focusing on one young man’s experience of following the fatal return to Pakistan of the self-exiled Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

  In the process, Shah’s new work combines fact with fiction, recorded historical and biographical details with personal anecdote, myth and legend. A Sindhi herself who can trace her lineage back to the early 18th-century Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, the author describes the experience of writing the book as “somewhere halfway between a dream and a long hallucination into the past” — and, specifically, the “rich history” and “heritage” of “this beautiful province”. A Season for Martyrs, in its attempts to “envision” the lives of the poet-saints, and “understand” how their inheritors came to be “power-brokers in Sindh”, also endeavours — significantly for our times — to comprehend the magnetism of modern politician-poets like Bhutto who, since her death, has also been the subject of myth-making and veneration.

  The novel’s contemporary narrative opens in Karachi and unfolds not only in the capital of Bhutto’s native Sindh, but also partly in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, where its denouement takes place. Spanning the nine weeks from Bhutto’s homecoming celebrations in mid-October, sabotaged by a suicide bombing, to her assassination at an election campaign rally at the end of December 2007, it presents, from the point of view of the 20-something protagonist Ali Sikandar, a critical and at times highly cynical perspective on the political career of Pakistan’s first woman prime minister. Although narrated from an omniscient third-person perspective, the 10 alternate chapters of the novel tell the story of the television researcher Ali, an estranged son of a pro-Bhutto Sindhi landowner, frustrated with his father’s blindness to the politicians’ faults and ashamed to confess his identity, are nevertheless very much dominated by the young man’s point-of-view.

  Disenchanted with his media job, uninspiring studies, the privileged lifestyle of his Karachiite friends, even the prospect of a coveted US visa, and additionally depressed by his cameraman’s killing in the first assault on the Dubai-returned Bhutto, Ali starts to find some solace by “dissolving”, “annihilating” or “losing himself” in ecstatic “union” with the protesting crowds whose activities he is sent to monitor. These include those demanding for Musharraf’s resignation in the wake of the dismissal of the chief justice, and the imposition of emergency rule. Inspired by this feeling of belonging, he gradually shifts from the position of spectator to participant, becoming involved with the underground People’s Resistance Movement, and with the world of “smart” “Protests.

  Marches. Vigils. Blogs.” aimed at circumventing the censure of both “army and establishment”, and ensuring that voices raised against dictatorship cannot be silenced.

  Yet in the process of his increasing involvement, Ali does not undergo a dramatic political conversion so much as find a sense of purpose, a means to shirk off a stifling “helplessness”. Shah casts his trajectory from the mid-October day, when he is assigned the seemingly irksome task of obtaining “vox pop” responses to the return of the hallowed Benazir, to the late-December one when his optimism and imagination are finally fired by the infectious atmosphere of the Rawalpindi rally, as a journey from jadedness to reluctant admiration, and eventual, tragic epiphany.

  Ali’s story is lodged between sketches of significant moments in the lives of those powerful men who previously presided over and shaped Sindh’s cultural heritage and history from the 10th to the 20th centuries. These include the Sindh-conquering general Charles Napier; the region’s saintly Sufi protector Khawaja Khizr; Shah’s determinedly anti-colonial ancestor Jeandal Shah; wily Scots explorer Alexander Burnes; Jeay Sindh founder G. M. Syed; and Pir Pagaro, the Hurs’ controversial leader, in addition to the ascetic scribe of the famed, folkloric tales of Sindh’s seven self-sacrificing heroines, Bhitai, whom the author describes as her book’s “guiding spirit”.

  The most engaging of these accounts, it has to be confessed, are the most fantastical ones (rather than the surely erudite but less arresting attempts to animate significant historical events, such as the convening of influential pirs at the Provincial Khilafat Conference in Sann in 1920). These include the tale of the honourable Jeandal Shah’s desperate effort to wrestle for his life with his master’s pet cheetah, after having failed to save Sindh from the British. The haunting story of the incarcerated and soon-to-be hanged Pir Pagaro’s last game of chess with his young awestruck jailer is also particularly memorable. Last but not least is the appearance in the novel’s later pages of a youthful Benazir, into whose world Ali’s zamindar father Sikandar briefly steps to offer his condolences on the murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the hands of Zia’s military regime in 1979. We see her here, delicate and chador-swathed, as a grief-stricken girl, desperate for this stranger to supply her with a shred of hope — which Sikandar does, by way of a second-hand story of having witnessed her condemned father’s composure and resilience. This is a story that, according to Shah, “would pass into legend, as would all the tales and myths surrounding [Bhutto’s] mysterious death” — and as the stories surrounding that of his daughter will surely do too.

  In the Acknowledgements to A Season for Martyrs Shah mentions that the writer and critic Aamer Hussein “nicknamed” her work-in-progress her “GSN or ‘Great Sindhi Novel’”. In its range and density of historical content it may offer the beginnings perhaps, but the novel as it is currently composed is more a series of vignettes which serve to punctuate rather than profoundly connect with the more accessible, contemporary narrative of a young Pakistani’s journey from political alienation to hazy enlightenment. Shah’s novel is also perhaps an early contribution to a much wider cultural project of trying to grapple with Pakistan’s — and particularly Sindh’s — relationship to the ambiguous icon that is Benazir.

  The reviewer has a PhD in contemporary South Asian Literature in English from the University of East London.

  A Season for Martyrs

  (NOVEL)

  By Bina Shah

  Delphinium Books, US

  ISBN 978-1883285616

  282pp.
  Read more
  POETRY: ALONE IN THE CROWD
  NON-FICTION: THE QUIET POET
  COLUMN: ISMAT’S LAST FLOWERING
  On DawnNews
  Comments (0) Closed

• Toronto Review of Books
  https://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/2016/09/bina-shahs-season-martyrs/
  Word count: 1834

  QUOTED: "History and memory have long fingers that reach into the present and beyond and in A Season for Martyrs Shah’s characters navigate that tenuous space between worlds beautifully."

  The funeral congregated in Liaquat National Bagh park. Angry clerics denounced the government for allowing the execution to proceed, and an ambulance strewn with flowers carried Mumtaz Qadri’s body slowly through the crowds. When Qadri was executed for the murder of Punjab governor and Benazir Bhutto loyalist Salman Taseer on February 29th, Pakistan’s sharp ideological divisions and complexities were once again laid bare. Taseer was a critic of Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws and their predominant use against minorities; Qadri shot Taseer 27 times with an AK-47 assault rifle. Thousands of people attended Qadri’s funeral, and more stayed quiet, with school closures throughout Rawalpindi as well as further afield in Islamabad. Security forces were on high alert.

  Like Pakistan itself, Liaquat National Bagh in Rawalpindi has seen it all before. It precedes the very creation of Pakistan. First created as Company Park under the British Raj, it was later renamed after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was shot and killed there in 1951. It was also the place of Benazir Bhutto’s last political address to her nation, and it was as she exited this park that she was killed.

  Nine years after her assassination, Bhutto continues to cast a long shadow. Pakistan remains a place where political legacies and dynasties are dyed into the fabric of the nation, and where ambiguities, violence and muddled histories live on. Truths in Pakistan, about assassinations and much else, are often elusive. It is perhaps understandable then that not many writers have sought to incorporate Bhutto into their stories, yet Bina Shah has boldly done just that in her work, A Season for Martyrs.

  This is an ambitious novel. It interweaves the rich history of the province of Sindh, from well before the creation of Pakistan, with a present day narrative. It is a story of saints, poets and politics. And is as much a love letter to Sindh with all its failings and complexities, as an overarching novel. “There has been a lot of academic work on this province but no fiction as such. And I thought it was really important to try and get those stories down and also to immortalize Benazir Bhutto in fiction,” says Shah. “I just thought nobody’s doing it, I better do it. It is the right thing to do right now.”

  The book centers on the story of Ali Sikandar, a journalist at a television news channel in Karachi. When we meet Ali, he has been successfully concealing his origins from his social circle, but his secrecy leaves him angry and isolated. The cause of his shame and secrecy is his family’s status as feudals, historic landowners within Sindh, much decried for their social standing and wealth. Ali’s father has also married a second wife and now has a new family, abandoning the old. Ali juggles his job with finishing his degree at Bhutto University and covertly dating Sunita, his Hindu girlfriend.

  The backdrop of the novel is the lead up to the 2008 elections. Ali’s family and the nature of his work steep him in the politics of the country, and yet he is disillusioned with the parties and their various leaders. And this includes Bhutto. The figure of Bhutto floats variously from background and forefront throughout the novel, omnipresent throughout.

  Benazir Bhutto returned from exile in October 2007, promising to run for a third term as Prime Minister. Tens of thousands of supporters greeted her upon her return to Karachi in 2007, despite her inglorious departure eight years earlier when, marred by charges of corruption after two terms in office, she was forced into political exile. Bhutto and her family have had immense influence in Pakistan, and her arrival home captured the attention of both her country and the international community. In November 2007, President General Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the county’s constitution, as well as deposing Pakistan’s high court judges. Vigorous protests and media crackdowns ensued.

  When Ali is caught in a bomb blast while covering Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, it serves as a catalyst for his spiral into a new existence, as his carefully curated life begins to crack. He has pinned his future on gaining acceptance to a US university, thus escaping his responsibilities to his fractured family and the stifling conservatism and simmering instability of Pakistan. Yet, just as this seems within his grasp, Ali finds himself drawn to stay. He toys with leaving and instead joins the fledgling activist and artist movement protesting the state of emergency.

  Shah’s novel casts a wide net. She incorporates historical narratives from the British colonization of Sindh as well as the stories of Sindhi saints and their followers as threads of the novel, cutting through the present day narrative. These passages have a lyrical feel to them, perhaps in reference to the great poetry in which many of these stories are enshrined. The work of the Sindhi master Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, an ancestor of Bina Shah’s, is particularly influential here.

  Shah has a complex and diverse culture and histories to draw from and she writes with a familiarity and command that only hints at the research this work must have required. She also manages to make these passages set in the past accessible for those unfamiliar, a necessary component for many Western readers. Certain minor plot details within the present-day novel seem neglected, Ali’s interest in one of his fellow activists goes nowhere and a chance meeting with Sunita after time apart seems a little contrived, but these are small.

  This novel marks Shah’s publishing debut in North America, though her past works have been published in multiple languages. Her novel Slum Child, detailing the struggles of a young Christian girl from an impoverished area of Karachi was a bestseller in Italy. Class, societal fissures and tropes also provide a backdrop for this latest work and are deftly handled as the story maneuvers. “The whole country is very stuck on stereotypes about each other, that is why there is such disunity,” says Shah. “And people cling to those stereotypes as a way to justify division, prejudice and discrimination. That’s something very troubling about this society, but I as a writer can challenge that.”

  A Season for Martyrs is a captivating work, but one that is not always easy to digest. The reader knows so much of the larger story from news headlines before the first page is opened, and indeed the novel ends just as the world’s attention is about to turn towards Rawalpindi, minutes away from Bhutto’s murder. One reads it with the tension of already knowing the outcome, of biting our nails to the quick. To use a well-known figure as an anchor for a work is challenging precisely because so much of Bhutto’s life has been recorded, both by herself and others. For Shah, it was a complicated balance to strike and she admits she found writing from Bhutto’s perspective very difficult. Within the novel, the reader bears witness to the former prime minister at three very different stages of her life, yet only at the end of the work do we glimpse her point of view. Yet when Shah briefly captures Bhutto’s voice, it is sparse and understated and the presence of the former prime minister does not overwhelm the book as whole or overtake the other narratives.

  Bhutto’s spectral presence over the country is also expressed through the voices of the other characters in the work. The protagonist and his father represent opposing views; the older man is a diehard Bhutto supporter while his son is quite skeptical and struggles to understand and evaluate her legacy. These differing stances butt up against one another often.

  This novel is also particularly poignant in how reality and fiction blend into one another in smaller facets. Real people—prominent human rights activists, lawyers and artists—are referenced, as are actual locations within Karachi that evoke a particular essence and aesthetic of this time. You get a keen sense of the mundane frustrations of living in Pakistan, from power shortages and mad traffic to the layers of bureaucracy and hustle and the minor ways class infiltrates all; these small details create a sense of verisimilitude even within the historical narratives. For someone who has spent time in Karachi, this novel is like encountering an old acquaintance, even from behind, you would recognize them anywhere. In a bitter reminder of the fragility of life, Bhutto’s is not the only killing that echoes through this work. Sabeen Mahmud, a human rights activist and proprietor of popular Karachi café The Second Floor—a space that housed many actual People’s Resistance meetings as well as the ones fictionalized within the novel—was shot and killed in April 2015, only months after this book was published.

  On June 8th, a familiar news story emerged from Pakistan. Zeenat Rafiq, 18, was murdered in a so-called “honor killing’ in Lahore; her mother, Perveen, allegedly doused her with kerosene and set her on fire after she married without family consent. It was the third case of this nature reported within a month in Pakistan. It is an understatement to say that the country which produced one of the most globally recognized female leaders still struggles with gender discrimination and violence, amongst other problems, almost a decade after her death. Yet Shah remains optimistic about her home: “We look like a complete basket case, but when you are living here day to day and you are seeing the strides, you can’t write us off,” she says. “Difficult times call for a marshaling of resources and a summoning up of courage and a boldness, and that’s where we are. That spirit to fight and to fix what is wrong, not to accept this as the status quo.” This book captures periods of Pakistan’s past, both recent and ancient, that navigate, and agitate for, change. It is bold, well-crafted fiction of a volatile time, written itself in an only somewhat less tumultuous period.

  This novel tackles many harsh truths in a country where life may indeed seem too short. It is a story of new beginnings, self-acceptance and the confines that bind and sometimes set us free. History and memory have long fingers that reach into the present and beyond and in A Season for Martyrs Shah’s characters navigate that tenuous space between worlds beautifully.
  About the author
  Meghan Davidson Ladly

  Meghan Davidson Ladly lives and writes in Toronto.

• What is that Book About
  https://www.whatisthatbookabout.com/reviews/2014/12/28/review-a-season-for-martyrs-by-bina-shah
  Word count: 796

  QUOTED: "The way she blended the past and the present bringing to life the culture and history of Sindh was such a brilliant narrative. Such a compelling storyteller, you will not only fall in love with the story being told but appreciate the true valor in risking everything for your voice to be heard."

  Summary

  The U.S. literary debut of an up-and-coming Pakistani novelist and journalist.

  Ali Sikandar is assigned to cover the arrival of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader who has returned home to Karachi after eight years of exile to take part in the presidential race. Already eager to leave for college in the U.S. and marry his forbidden Hindu girlfriend, Ali loses a friend in a horrific explosion and finds himself swept up in events larger than his individual struggle for identity and love when he joins the People’s Resistance Movement, a group that opposes President Musharraf. Amidst deadly terrorist attacks and protest marches, this contemporary narrative thread weaves in flashbacks that chronicle the deep and beautiful tales of Pakistani history, of the mythical gods who once protected this land. Bina Shah, a journalist herself and now a NYT op-ed writer, illustrates with extraordinary depth and keen observation into daily life the many contradictions of a country struggling to make peace with itself.
  Review

  When one thinks of Pakistan, depending on who you are, your mind might immediately grasp onto stereotyped perceptions of what you think defines its’ cultural identity and heritage. As a reader, thoroughly enamored by her gorgeous, vibrant novel, A Season of Martyrs, a title so fitting, embraces a powerful and illuminating homage blending generations presenting the heart & soul of those in a region whose suffered convictions beg to be heard.

  Eloquent and beautifully written, we are swept into a novel alternating between almost the last two hundred years blending a rich history of familial and culture folklore, myths and historical derivatives from events stemming from commentary and research of Sindh’s past and through the present Pakistan. Connecting the history of a feudal family to the Bhuttos, Shah’s American debut illuminates our minds with a captivating literary voice that permeates from beginning to end.

  The novel can be broken down into two blended central themes. One is the perspective told through the eyes of a young journalist named Ali. Ali brings a perspective to the book that represents a voice that never gets heard. He is someone who has had it hard but is determined not to let history repeat itself nor become the expected statistic. His passionate voice from his story of forbidden love with someone who would be considered taboo, familial issues of abandonment, political conflicts and his journey to finding himself opens the reader to a world that many here from a Western perspective don’t really see. Being in a country that’s core is democracy, daily life is taken for granted that you have the freedom to say what you want, live how you want and be who you want without being punished or persecuted. So empowering to see his character evolve and fight for a voice whose silence would be safer, challenges the cultural norms that defined what he is supposed to be.

  Beyond his story perspective, there is the connection to what I would consider the second theme of the book that involves the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto with her arrival into Pakistan from exile. The focus within the book was concentrated on the last couple of months of her life until her assassination but we learned through the history of his family her connection with them. What I really loved about her portrayal in the book was that despite the political conflicts and the consequences of believing in a movement that was against the mainstream belief, as a woman in a cultural that having this sort of power was not the norm, it was inspiring to read. I was in my twenties when Benazir was killed but remember how incredible it was for a woman to have such an influence and so much power was amazing consider the limited opportunities for women.

  Overall, I thought this book was amazing. The way she blended the past and the present bringing to life the culture and history of Sindh was such a brilliant narrative. Such a compelling storyteller, you will not only fall in love with the story being told but appreciate the true valor in risking everything for your voice to be heard. I would definitely add this one to your upcoming reading list.

  Reviewed by Michelle Bowles

  Pages: 288 pages
  Publisher: Delphinium (November 4, 2014)

• Free Press Journal
  http://www.freepressjournal.in/book-reviews/a-season-for-martyrs-by-bina-shah/1040816
  Word count: 795

  A Season for Martyrs: Review
  — By Jatin Desai | Mar 25, 2017 04:35 pm

  A Season for Martyrs

  Author: Bina Shah

  Publisher: Speaking Tiger

  Price: Rs. 350

  A season for Martyrs by Bina Shah is a brilliant book which tells the history of Sindh, a province of Pakistan. She mixes myth with history and the personal with the political. She presents picture of Sindh by narrating past with its entire glorious spiritual, cultural and political heritage. She also narrates today’s Sindh, as seen through the eyes of a young tv journalist Ali Sikandar, who is an urban Sindhi. These two are directly connected. Sindh’s glorious history continues to influence the current young activists. The composite culture is influencing new breed of activists. The two are indelibly connected. Contemporary Sindh is the result of the Sufi saints, the Pirs, the peasants, the poets, the kings and queens, Hindus, Kalhora and Talpur, and the British rulers.

  Author intertwined threads from the past with Ali Sikandar’s story to recreate the modern Sindhi experience. Sindh has cities like Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana etc and it also has deserts. Lives in the desert villages are most difficult. Hindu community also has a sizeable presence in cities as well as in rural areas. Sindhis are conscious about their past. Author by using history and the modern story presents a true picture of Sindh. People affected by hardships and sufferings speak against the brutal dictators. Young activists talks of peoples’ resistance.

  The book begins with Karachi of 1843 and ends with Rawalpindi on December 27 2007. It was on 27th December 2007 former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Rawalpindi is a garrison city with army headquarters. Again it was in Rawalpindi her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged by then dictator Zia ul Haq on April 4 1979. It was here, the first PM of Pakistan Liaquat Ali Khan was shot dead by an Afghan from the Zadran tribe when he was about to make an announcement at the Municipal park. The park was later renamed after him. It was in this Liaquat Bagh Park; Benazir Bhutto addressed her last election meeting. Benazir was assassinated immediately after meeting was over. The book revolves primarily around last phase of Benazir i.e. the of her return to Karachi on October 18 2007 to her assassination on December 27 2007.

  The author narrates details of Benazir’s last phase and movement for the restoration of judiciary through the eyes of Ali Sikandar. He belonged to a pir and feudal family. As a journalist, Ali covered Benazir’s return to Karachi. He was dissatisfied with his work and elite lifestyle of his Karachi friends. He was pained to see sufferings of poor people and farmers. His father Sikandar like many other feudal lords was living with his second wife. Sikandar had offered condolences to young Benazir after her father was hanged. At that time she was in and out of jail and some time under house arrest. Ali was in love with a Hindu girl Sunita. One fine day he goes on leave of absence from his tv job and joins Peoples’ Resistance Movement. It was the time when Pervez Musharraf was the President of Pakistan. Then Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry was suspended and put under house arrest. Movement for the restoration of judiciary was getting wider support.

  Peoples’ Resistance Movement organized street plays and agitations supporting Chief Justice. They also organized a rally in the capital city of Islamabad, where they were beaten by police. Salma, a young girl, also joined resistance. She was a medical student and lied to her parents to join Islamabad rally. There was Ferzana and Imran.

  Interestingly book has a reference of Sufi shrine of Sehwan when Z A Bhuuto was taken from jail and produced before the Supreme Court in a very weak condition. In February this shrine was attacked by a suicide bomber in which more than 90 people were killed. The book narrates,” when he (Bhutto) stood before the judge, ready to speak, many people did not think he would be strong enough. But then he gripped the sides of the dock and called out for help to Saeen Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the great Saint of Sehwan…and then he regained his strength, and he was able to speak, and he spoke eloquently, for four days after that.” It indicates the Sufi culture. Sindh was the land of the Sufi saints.
  Tagged with: former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Hindu community modern Sindhi Pakistan Liaquat Ali Khan pervez musharraf Sufi culture Sufi saints Sufi shrine of Sehwan when Z A Bhuuto then Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry Weekend reads Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

• Fresh Fiction
  http://freshfiction.com/review.php?id=49677
  Word count: 570

  QUOTED: "The interpersonal relations between the journalists and Ali's family members are great. The layered emotions within Ali as he takes his emotional journey and joins the revolution are exquisite and absolutely relatable. This is a very well-written novel."

  A Season For Martyrs
  Bina Shah

  Reviewed by Ashleigh Compton
  Posted January 2, 2015

  Fiction | Historical

  When former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto comes home after years in exile to run once more for office, the country lights up in conflict and passions run high. Case in point: Ali Sikandar, a journalist assigned to cover Benazir's conflict-filled return. With his personal life in turmoil and his desire to study in the United States blocked at every turn, Ali is skeptical that any good could come of giving a second chance to someone whose first political term ended in such disgrace. Even so, he becomes part of a democratic resistance movement which teaches him some final lessons about the way his life has gone. Through the clever weaving of pieces from Ali's past and the distant past of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan, author Bina Shah creates a very personal, deeply moving story in A SEASON FOR MARTYRS.

  What I thought was going to be a vague cultural criticism novel turns out to be a fascinating character study and insight into the politics of Pakistan. The interpersonal relations between the journalists and Ali's family members are great. The layered emotions within Ali as he takes his emotional journey and joins the revolution are exquisite and absolutely relatable. This is a very well-written novel and I look forward to reading more by Bina Shah. The prose style is very straightforward and sprinkled with great information about the political situations. I love all the main characters and the fascinating play between them and everyone on the side.

  It can be somewhat hard to understand given the jumps from various histories to the main story. Each piece is valuable in its own way, but the form of the story can be jarring if you prefer a linear narrative. I also found some problems understanding the historical and political events, but that comes more from my background than any issue with the book. If I had my druthers, I'd have a glossary of terms, something to allow for more understanding. However, I highly recommend A SEASON FOR MARTYRS to any who enjoys fascinating and rich novels which intertwine truth and fiction.
  Learn more about A Season For Martyrs
  SUMMARY

  October, 2007. Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returns home after eight years of exile to seek political office once more. Assigned to cover her controversial arrival is TV journalist Ali Sikandar, the estranged son of a wealthy landowner from the interior region of Sindh. While her presence ignites fierce protests and assassination attempts, Ali finds himself irrevocably drawn to the pro-democracy People’s Resistance Movement, a secret that sweeps him into the many contradictions of a country still struggling to embrace modernity. As Shah weaves together the centuries-old history of Ali’s feudal family and its connection to the Bhuttos, she brilliantly reveals a story at the crossroads of the personal and the political, a chronicle of one man’s desire to overcome extremity to find love, forgiveness, and even identity itself.
  What do you think about this review?

• India
  www.india.com/entertainment/pakistani-author-bina-shah-speaks-on-her-most-recent-novel-a-season-for-martyrs-286262/
  Word count: 1393

  QUOTED: "I wanted to write something that took in the recent events surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s death, but to give it a context, which is the history and politics of Sindh. ... It made sense to go back into time and talk about the ancient Sufis because their influence on Sindh has been profound. Once you go that far back and look into those myths and legends, the whole project takes on a more spiritual edge."
  "I did write the novel differently from my previous novels—more experimental in style, more voices, more playing around with time—because I wanted to challenge myself."

  t’s no wonder Bina Shah split much of her life between Pakistan and America – she’s one of those authors who perfectly relates each world to one another with words. The Karachi-based author has a powerful perspective and an innate ability to bring larger issues into her writing.
  Pakistani Author Bina Shah Speaks on her Most Recent Novel ‘A Season For Martyrs’
  Updated: April 29, 2015 2:05 AM IST
  By Zara Husaini

  bina shah

  It’s no wonder Bina Shah split much of her life between Pakistan and America – she’s one of those authors who perfectly relates each world to one another with words. The Karachi-based author has a powerful perspective and an innate ability to bring larger issues into her writing.

  “Unlike other Pakistani English writers who were more influenced by British writers in their education, I was more exposed to American writers – especially American children’s classics – and taught to write in a more direct, simple style,” Shah, who spent five years in Virginia but the majority of her childhood in Pakistan, said. “So I was schooled very much outside the traditional way that Pakistanis grow up studying and reading English literature, and it affected all aspects of me as a reader and writer today.”

  Shah, an accomplished journalist, novelist and essayist, has made waves all over the world with her published work but her most recent novel, “A Season For Martyrs,” marks this author’s American literary debut.

  This won’t be her first time writing for an American readership, though. In fact, she came into prominence last year when her essay – an essay she had intended to be published in the International New York Times – made it into the paper’s U.S. edition.

  Shah sums up the experience of having the essay, entitled “A ‘Homeland’ We Pakistanis Don’t Recognize,” published for the American audience. For this piece, Shah wrote about the popular Showtime show “Homeland,” which portrays events set in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even though Shah awaited the season with anticipation, she writes “I knew those events would be linked to the only thing that seems to interest the world’s eye: terrorism and how Islamist extremism affects Americans and the West.”

  “I submitted that piece for my [International New York Times] column thinking that it was just like any other piece I’d done for them,” Shah said. “It made it to the U.S. edition of the paper, which doesn’t happen each time. So I wasn’t prepared for the reaction it got – the hostility from American readers, who were enraged that I challenged the show’s portrayal of Pakistanis and Pakistan. Essentially they said: ‘You are exactly like this, so don’t you dare contradict it, because we want to see you like this.’ There were a few really wonderful responses from Americans who had traveled to Pakistan themselves and knew what I was saying. But the majority were angered. I guess Americans take their pop culture really, really seriously – which was kind of the point of my piece.”

  Despite her previous exposure to American readers, “A Season For Martyrs” marks a major breakthrough for this Pakistani-American author. With that being said, it was not intentionally written for the American reader.

  “When I wrote the book, I had no plans for it to be published in the U.S. That came along much later, after the book had been translated and published in Italian,” she said.

  “A Season For Martyrs” tells the story of Ali Sikandar, a young Sindhi who struggles to find his own identity in Pakistan. We catch glimpses of Pakistani history and current affairs through the eyes of the protagonist.

  Sikandar is assigned to cover the arrival of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader at the time, who has returned home to Karachi after eight years of exile to take part in the presidential race. As a TV journalist and eager to leave for college in the U.S. and marry his forbidden Hindu girlfriend, Sikandar loses a friend in a horrific explosion and finds himself swept up in events larger than his individual struggle for identity and love. During this time, he joins the People’s Resistance Movement, a group that opposes President Pervez Musharraf. Amidst deadly terrorist attacks and protest marches, this contemporary narrative thread weaves in flashbacks that chronicle the deep and beautiful tales of Pakistani history, of the mythical gods who once protected this land.

  In her American debut, Shah sheds light on a region and culture little understood in the West, Sindh, a province of southeastern Pakistan, which is home to the fertile plain of the Indus River, the great mystical Sufi saints and a rich history that binds Muslims and Hindus alike. As Shah weaves together the centuries-old history of Ali’s feudal family and its connection to the Bhuttos, she reveals a story at the crossroads of the personal and the political, a chronicle of one man’s desire to overcome extremity to find love, forgiveness, and even identity itself.

  “I wanted to write something that took in the recent events surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s death, but to give it a context, which is the history and politics of Sindh,” Shah said. “It made sense to go back into time and talk about the ancient Sufis because their influence on Sindh has been profound. Once you go that far back and look into those myths and legends, the whole project takes on a more spiritual edge.”

  Shah admits that while she didn’t consciously approach this novel in a specific way to endear it to the American audience, there are creative differences between this and her previous work.

  “I did write the novel differently from my previous novels – more experimental in style, more voices, more playing around with time – because I wanted to challenge myself,” she said.

  Shah took her vow to challenge herself seriously – by stepping into the psyche of a male protagonist.

  “I like writing from the viewpoint of male characters,” Shah said. “I feel I’ve understood something very profound about the male psyche every time I do this. Men are complicated creatures because they’ve been taught all their lives to hide their most vulnerable selves. When I take on a male character and write from his perspective, I get to see the humanity that lies behind the mask of masculinity – which is where patriarchy really comes from: the mask, not the humanity.”

  As for Shah’s long list of credits, “A Season For Martyrs” is her fourth novel after “Where They Dream in Blue,” “The 786 Cybercafe,” and “Slum Child.” In addition to contributing regularly for The International New York Times’, she also holds degrees from Wellesley College, Harvard University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

  Safe to say, her accomplishments are noteworthy, considering Shah said she didn’t even know she wanted to be a writer as a child.

  “I was always drawn to the world of books and words,” Shah said. “I was an eager and early reader since childhood, but it was only in high school that I began to enjoy putting words down on paper to express myself. And then it was only in my mid-twenties that I realized I could make a life out of it.”

  Though Shah is not ready to discuss future plans, we suspect she will continue to inform, inspire and – most importantly – bring her two worlds, Pakistan and America, together.

• THE NEWS INTERNATIONAL
  https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/32136-a-season-for-martyrs-literary-enthusiasts-to-get-a-rare-account-of-sindh
  Word count: 462

  A season for martyrs: literary enthusiasts to get a rare account of Sindh

  Karachi
  Sindh is underdeveloped, poverty-riddled, and stalked by malnutrition, women suffer on account of male domination and things are not at all rosy.
  This is the backdrop to Bina Shah’s novel, “A season for martyrs”, an enlivening discussion on which was held on Monday at the Alliance Francais.
  The novel pivots around a 25-year old Sindhi youth, Ali Sikandar, who is greatly influenced by Benazir Bhutto.
  Coming from a different socio-economic background, he joins a television channel. In time, owing to his rural origins, he cracks under the pull of the centrifugal forces that he faces in the intra-office situation.
  The problems compound because of his Sindhi Hindu girlfriend.
  The dialogue was moderated by Nadya Chishti-Mujahid, an academic, who initiated it by asking Bina questions about various aspects of the novel and in the process bringing to the fore her writing technique and her views on social issues.
  Having taught at SZABIST (Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology), as she puts it, added to the material for the novel because there were young men and women who were going through a rather tortuous experience of balancing their conservative rural origin with the diametrically opposed urban values and ways, Bina said.
  The novel conveys the message of Sindhis leaving home and facing large multicultural areas, starting with the Sufi saints of Sindh, we come up to the present. “Some Sindhis still feel an allegiance to the Sindh they knew. It is a triangular structure.”
  Questioned by the moderator about her writing technique, she said, “The writer must go all-out for the truth. You have to tell a story that has reason and depth. The writer must be true to himself and his feelings”.
  Bina said, “We had to meet Shah Abdul Latif, Pir Pagara (father of the late one), and Bhutto as they reflected the landscape of Sindh.”
  “I envisioned Benazir Bhutto as a person who didn’t know who she

  was. She cajoles a servant into taking her to a fortune house where her destiny is disclosed to her”.
  She lamented that the Indus meant so much to Sindh and its very soul yet the connection and other things about the river were destroyed. She expressed disappointment at the fact that today writing was turning into a commercial corporate activity, robbing it of its aesthetic and literary value.
  Shah has had a glistening career in journalism and authorship. She is a regular contributor to Dawn, International New York Times, UK-based The Guardian and the Independent. She has published four novels and two compendia of short stories.

• Tor
  https://www.tor.com/2018/08/09/book-reviews-before-she-sleeps-by-bina-shah/
  Word count: 1491

  QUOTED: "The main characters are well-written and emotionally raw, Sabine in particular. Character details are sparsely and delicately delivered, but I never felt lost or confused. The worldbuilding is largely excellent. ... Everything from the tech to the sociopolitical rules to the literal landscape are vividly drawn."

  What Is, What Could Be, What Should Be: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah
  Alex Brown
  Thu Aug 9, 2018 2:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

  After nuclear war and global instability, Green City seems like a utopia, a place of hope and growth in the middle of a vast Southwest Asian desert. When a Virus decimates the female population, the Agency creates Perpetuation Bureau to repopulate the region. Men hold all the power, but must share a Wife with up to five other men. Women are stripped of their rights and made into “domestic scientists” whose sole purpose is to breed with their Husbands. The Bureau assigns marriages, monitors women’s fertility, and executes anyone who resists.

  Not long after the establishment of this patriarchal authoritarianism, two women disappear from Green City. In its underground tunnels they build the Panah, a secret community of women who refuse to be Wives. They survive through a kind of prostitution, offering powerful men not duty-bound sex but chaste intimacy. Sabine hates working with Clients and carries so much fear of being assaulted by them that she barely sleeps. On her way home from a Client she passes out on the street in severe pain and ends up in the hospital. Lin, the woman who runs the Panah, begs for help from Reuben Faro, a high-ranking man in the Agency who also happens to be her lover. A kindly male doctor keeps Sabine alive, but the longer she stays in the hospital, the more precarious her situation—and the future of the Panah—becomes.

  Dystopian fiction is a funhouse mirror held up to the present. It distorts our world just enough to exaggerate the differences, but not so much that it loses familiarity. In it we see how our society’s actions can contradict our values. There’s a reason the subgenre surges in popularity during periods of sociocultural turmoil. When done right, dystopian fiction reveals the chasm between who we say we are and who we really are by warning us of what we are about to become. When done poorly, it becomes a weak parable that neither pushes the conversation forward nor demands accountability. I want to tell you that Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah is well-crafted feminist dystopian science fiction. In many ways it is. But it fails for me in two key areas: queerness and authorial intent.
  Buy it Now

  There’s something to be said for a feminist dystopian novel using queerness and the gender binary to talk about the evils of the patriarchy. This is not one of those novels. Before She Sleeps is deeply, frustratingly, and inexplicably focused on cisnormativity and heteronormativity. The characters do not refute, scrutinize, or criticize how Green City constructs gender roles, identities, or expressions. They clearly don’t enjoy life under authoritarian rule, but that’s about it. Although the characters chafe at Green City’s gender roles, they’re really more upset about how those roles are enforced than how the roles are defined.

  The novel posits cishet as the default human experience and everything not that as violent, deviant behavior. This is disingenuous at best, dangerous at worst. Thing is, you simply cannot meaningfully critique the patriarchy when the only viewpoints considered are cisgender heterosexuals. Not in this day and age. Shah is, in effect, only looking at a fraction of the problem. I’d argue that a non-cishet perspective is actually a better lens for analyzing the patriarchy. People who aren’t cisgender, heterosexual, or both have substantially more to lose in a patriarchal society than those who are. Frankly, I think it’s a shame Sabine was written as cishet. Her storyline would have had so much more social commentary with some queerness folded in. But Shah still could have used the background narrative to venture beyond the rigid rules of cis/heteronormativity even while keeping the protagonists cishet.

  The absence of QTPOC narratives also begs a host of worldbuilding-related questions. What about the Virus that can be transmitted by men but kills only women? Gender is a social construct that exists on a wide, messy spectrum. You can’t apply gender stereotypes to diseases. And what happened to all the queer people when the new regime took over? Did they escape before the borders were sealed or did they go into hiding? Were trans people forced to detransition or were they executed? Did non-binary, genderqueer, and intersex people have to pick a binary expression, was the decision made for them by the government, or were they eliminated altogether? What about the queer men in power? Was the Panah open to trans or queer women? That by the end of the novel I know more about Green City’s malls than I do its queer community is disappointing to say the least.

  Shah intended Before She Sleeps as “a paean to women’s resourcefulness, the importance of male allies and friends, and faith that we can redress the imbalances of our societies.” While the novel somewhat succeeds at the first two, it neglects the third. The Panah is not a counterbalance to the Agency. Its founders sought refuge from Green City’s demands on womanhood, not to undermine the Agency’s control. They may not like the society they live in, but none of the characters, male or female, seem to have any interest in dismantling the system.

  As for the resourcefulness of women and the importance of male allyship, well, the novel binds the former to the latter. The resourcefulness of the women of the Panah comes solely from finding ways to make men need them. Men still hold all the power, they just wield it differently. Sabine, Rupa, and the other “rebellious” women hold as little personal agency in the Panah as they do in Green City. Men request their presence and the women go without resistance or hesitation. Men set the tone of the meeting, control ingress and egress, and can abuse their contracts with no oversight. Male allyship (or lack thereof) turns the plot, not the women’s resourcefulness. In other words, the women of the Panah are codependent, not independent.

  A lot of people are going to love this novel no matter my objections. It will appear on lists of the best feminist and dystopian fiction for years to come. And maybe it should. Although the overarching context of Before She Sleeps didn’t work for me, I was still captivated by Bina Shah. She concocted a moving tale about a frightening future that could all too easily come to pass. As much as I was concerned by what Shah left out, what was on the page was beautifully written.

  The novel is broken into three parts, and each chapter is told from different POVs. Sabine is the main protagonist and gets the most first-person narration, but other voices filter through to offer different takes on the proceedings. The main characters are well-written and emotionally raw, Sabine in particular. Character details are sparsely and delicately delivered, but I never felt lost or confused. The worldbuilding is largely excellent (with exception to the queer questions noted earlier). Everything from the tech to the sociopolitical rules to the literal landscape are vividly drawn.

  Besides Shah’s obvious talent, I can’t think of another feminist dystopian science fiction novel set in Southwest Asia. The background mythology is decidedly not European or Christian, a welcome change to the subgenre’s usual fare. The novel’s premise alone is fascinating enough to merit a read through. I just wish Shah did more with it.

  Ultimately, I can’t decide if I’m more disappointed for Before She Sleeps not being what I wanted it to be or for not being what it could have been. Yet by rejecting queerness, a novel that by all rights should be the new A Handmaid’s Tale instead becomes a shadow of Atwood’s seminal work. And I think that’s what bothers me most of all. We’re long past due for the next great feminist dystopian science fiction novel. Bina Shah comes close, but stumbles where it counts.

  Alex Brown is a YA librarian by day, local historian by night, pop culture critic/reviewer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, check out her endless barrage of cute rat pics on Instagram, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

• Seattle Book Review
  https://seattlebookreview.com/product/before-she-sleeps/
  Word count: 236

  QUOTED: "Before She Sleeps is a wonderfully written book."

  🔍
  Before She Sleeps
  Before She Sleeps
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  $25.00

  Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah stands out among all the other dystopian future books of its kind. Before She Sleeps takes place in a world where women are considered endangered of being extinct and therefore must take up multiple husbands, just to make sure humankind can continue to thrive. But within a society, there will be those that will question and fight against what their society wants them to do. Before She Sleeps follows a small cast of characters, each unique and complex in their own ways.

  Before She Sleeps is a wonderfully written book, and even though, at first, it seemed like a book that would not interest me as a reader, I was mistaken. I fell in love with the world that Bina Shah created, and no matter how hard I tried, there was no way that I would have set down Before She Sleeps until I was at the end.
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  Reviewed By: Ellie Woods

  Author Bina Shah
  Star Count 4.5/5
  Format Hard
  Page Count 256 pages
  Publisher Delphinium
  Publish Date 2018-Aug-07
  ISBN 9781883285760
  Amazon Buy this Book
  Issue September 2018
  Category Science Fiction & Fantasy
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