The golden legend : a novel /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017Edition: First editionDescription: 319 pagesContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780451493781
- 0451493788
- 823/.914 23
- PR9540.9.A83 G65 2017
- FIC019000 | FIC045000 | FIC051000
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Harrison Library Adult Fiction | Harrison Library | Book | ASLAM (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021379297 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Fiction | Hayden Library | Book | ASLAM (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021379230 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A brave, timely, searingly beautiful novel from the acclaimed author of The Blind Man's Garden: set in contemporary Pakistan, the story of a Muslim widow and her Christian neighbors whose community is consumed by violent religious intolerance
When shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road, Nargis's life begins to crumble around her. Her husband, Massud--a fellow architect--is caught in the cross fire and dies before she can confess her greatest secret to him. Now under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, who demands that she pardon her husband's American killer, Nargis fears that the truth about her past will soon be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people's secrets from the minaret of the local mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. When the loudspeakers reveal a forbidden romance between a Muslim cleric's daughter and Nargis's Christian neighbor, Nargis finds herself trapped in the center of the chaos tearing their community apart. In his characteristically luminous prose, Nadeem Aslam has given us a lionhearted novel that reflects Pakistan's past and present in a single mirror, a story of corruption, resilience, and the disguises that are sometimes necessary for survival--a revelatory portrait of the human spirit.
"A brave, timely, searingly beautiful novel from the acclaimed author of The Blind Man's Garden: set in contemporary Pakistan, the story of a Muslim widow and her Christian neighbors whose community is consumed by violent religious intolerance When shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road, Nargis's life begins to crumble around her. Her husband, Massud--a fellow architect--is caught in the cross fire and dies before she can confess her greatest secret to him. Now under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, who demands that she pardon her husband's American killer, Nargis fears that the truth about her past will soon be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people's secrets from the minaret of the local mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. When the loudspeakers reveal a forbidden romance between a Muslim cleric's daughter and Nargis's Christian neighbor, Nargis finds herself trapped in the center of the chaos tearing their community apart. In his characteristically luminous prose, Nadeem Aslam has given us a lionhearted novel that reflects Pakistan's past and present in a single mirror, a story of corruption, resilience, and the disguises that are sometimes necessary for survival--a revelatory portrait of the human spirit"--
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Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
On the day of his death, Massud awoke to the muezzin's call to prayer and the smell of baking bread, a fragrance, he had read, that instills kindness in human beings. There are many acts of generosity in this exquisite novel, though they are equaled by the treachery and corruption common to this Punjab region of northern Pakistan, where Muslims and Christians live warily side by side. Massud's grieving widow, Nargis, refuses to accept blood money from the state in exchange for her absolution of the American who shot her husband, causing the authorities to investigate this difficult woman, who may be harboring a blasphemous secret. Her intransigence draws adverse scrutiny to the Christian family who lives next door, a young woman named Helen and her widowed father, Lily, who is in a forbidden relationship with the imam's daughter. Through the reminiscences of each of these deeply sympathetic characters, Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden; The Wasted Vigil) elucidates the history of occupation and division that has influenced Pakistan's current climate of religious intolerance. VERDICT Man Booker Prize long-listed and -Dublin short-listed Aslam uses lush, sensuous prose to create beauty from ugliness, calm from chaos, and love from hatred, offering hope to believers and nonbelievers alike. This thoughtful, thought-provoking read will enthrall lovers of international fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
Aslam's exquisite, luminous novel is set in the imaginary city of Samara, somewhere in northern Pakistan between Kashmir and the border of Afghanistan. Nargis, an architect, has lost her husband, Massud, to a rogue American bullet, which hit him as he passed books in a human chain to a new library that he and Nargis designed. Their Christian ex-servant, Lily, and his daughter, Helen, whom Nargis and Massud have nurtured intellectually and whose mother was murdered by a Muslim, live next door. Helen falls in love with a Kashmiri named Imran, who turns up at Nargis's house one day, having escaped from a group of jihadists with whom he trained. Bigotry frequently erupts into violence in their district, and each of these characters will suffer. Nargis is pressured by a military intelligence agent to forgive her husband's murderer for blood money. Helen is pursued for blasphemous journalism. Lily, a Christian, and his lover, the widowed daughter of a local Muslim cleric, are exposed and pursued by a mob, which burns down their neighborhood. Lily disappears, and Nargis, Helen, and Imran flee to a secluded island, where they begin a strange but lovely idyll of love and friendship that sharply contrasts with what surrounds them. Hidden, the three lovingly repair a book written by Massud's father that was torn to pieces by the authorities, using golden thread to stitch its pages together again. The Pakistan depicted in this harrowing novel is unbearably wrenched apart by terror and prejudice, but the dignity of Aslam's (The Blind Man's Garden) characters and their devotion to one another rises far above the violence. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.Booklist Review
The Pakistan of memory, with its relative tolerance, collides with the harsh realities of modern Pakistan in Aslam's (The Blind Man's Garden, 2013) aching lamentation. Massud and Narghis are husband-and-wife architects and guardians of a treasured library. But when Massud is killed in an altercation involving an American spy, a Pakistani intelligence officer turns ruthless in his insistence that Narghis publicly forgive the attacker. Meanwhile, Narghis' adopted daughter, Helen, a journalist who was born Christian but pretends to be Muslim, falls in love with Imran, a Kashmiri gone AWOL from a terrorist training camp. Together they shelter in the remains of an island mosque that the architects, in a moment of idealism, had designed to bring rival sects together in ecumenical worship. But even there, they cannot find sanctuary. The plot pivots on acts of cruelty and political violence, but the moments in between are wistful, languid, and suffused with longing for a gentler time. Carefully constructed and thoughtful, this is, one senses, a highly personal work for Aslam, whose family was forced to leave Pakistan.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 BooklistKirkus Book Review
"This world is the last thing God will ever tell us": an aching, lyrical story of schisms and secrets in present-day Pakistan.Nargis has something to tell, a secret that she has been carrying for a lifetime. "She had succeeded in concealing herself in the false story she had constructed," writes Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden, 2013, etc.), having already suggested why there are many good reasons to hide inside inventions in a Pakistan that is increasingly torn apart by sectarian strife, the muezzin's call punctuated by denunciations of romance across religious lines as gentle young scholars rush to join the jihadis. There is much violence: Nargis' Christian housekeepers are still mourning the loss of one of their own, murdered by a man just recently freed from prison as a reward for having memorized the Quran, and now Nargis must deal with grief herself, her husband caught in the crossfire of a gunfight involving a "large healthily built white man." She has barely a moment to mourn when Pakistani military intelligence agents are at her door to demand that she forgive the American for the deatha demand that carries the implication that if she does not comply, her secret will come spilling out to destroy the rest of her family. Aslam's story has all the gravity of a tragedy and one of many dimensions: Nargis' island retreat, once a place of calm where a church and a Hindu temple stood alongside a mosque, is riven by people seeking difference in the place of similarity, as she wonders, "Which God or Gods had built that world?" And indeed, tucked away inside Aslam's quietly unwinding narrative are snippets of and allusions to religious tales that speak to the wisdom of earlier daysthe title itself is one of themagainst the unwisdom of our own. Brooding and beautiful: a mature, assured story of the fragility of the world and of ourselves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
NADEEM ASLAM was born in Pakistan and now lives in England. He is the author of four previous novels, most recently The Blind Man's Garden. His work has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, short-listed for the IMPAC prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and won the Kiriyama Prize, the Encore Award, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.There are no comments on this title.