About the Author

Ali Sethi grew up in Pakistan in a family of dissenting journalists and publishers. A recent Harvard graduate, he has contributed to The New York Times and The Nation among other publications. He currently lives in Lahore.

Reviews

a"The Wish Maker," in Ali Sethias mature and sure-handed prose, is an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and an illuminating look at one of the worldas most turbulent regions. Ali Sethi steadfastly resists the usual clichA(c)s about both Islam and his native country. Instead, he offers a nuanced, often humorous, and always novel look at life in modern day Pakistan.a
a Khaled Hosseini, author of "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns"

The turbulence of contemporary Pakistani politics is refracted through the intimate prism of a fractious extended family in this mature debut, written when the author was 23. Twenty-year-old Zaki Shirazi, his military father dead before he was born, is raised with his rebellious female cousin Samar Api in a Lahore household dominated by his liberal mother, Zakia, editor of a crusading women's magazine, and his strong-willed, culturally conservative grandmother, Daadi. The nimble two-track narrative shifts between post-9/11, when Zaki returns from college in Massachusetts for Samar's wedding, and his childhood in the early 1990s, around the time then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, an act that polarized the country. The political background frames Sethi's complex narrative, but the primary focus is on the family's relatively privileged-and often as argumentative as it is loving-household, providing Western readers with an insider's atmospheric take on a culture and a country much in the news these days. (June) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

a"The Wish Maker," in Ali Sethias mature and sure-handed prose, is an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and an illuminating look at one of the worldas most turbulent regions. Ali Sethi steadfastly resists the usual clichA(c)s about both Islam and his native country. Instead, he offers a nuanced, often humorous, and always novel look at life in modern day Pakistan.a
a Khaled Hosseini, author of "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns"