An American diplomat is forced to confront the devastation of her past when she is assigned to remote northern Afghanistan. Twenty-one years ago, diplomat Angela Morgan witnessed the death of her husband during the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Devastated by her loss, she fled back to America, where she hid in the backwaters of the State Department and avoided the high-profile postings that would advance her career. Now, with that career about to dead-end and no true connections at home, she must take the one assignment available-at a remote British army outpost in northern Afghanistan. Unwelcome among the soldiers and unaccepted by the local government and warlords, Angela has to fight to earn the respect of her colleagues, especially the enigmatic Mark Davies, a British major who is by turns her staunchest ally and her fiercest critic. Frustrated at her inability to contribute to the nation's reconstruction, Angela slips out of camp disguised in a burka to provide aid to the refugees in the war-torn region. She becomes their farishta, or "angel," in the local Dari language-and discovers a new purpose for her life, a way to finally put her grief behind her. Drawing on the experiences of the author as a diplomat in Afghanistan, Farishta is a deeply moving and fast-paced story of a woman struggling to move beyond a past trauma, and finding a new community, a new love, and a new sense of self in the process.

Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most important writer of the present time. His significant and controversial literary interventions in debates on post-colonial culture and contemporary South Asian Islam are matched by the contribution he has made to postmodern literature in the West (culminating in the award to him in 1993 of the twenty-fifth-anniversary Booker of Bookers prize). This collection of articles focuses on Rushdie's five novels. The context is set by the introduction, The Politics of Salman Rushdie's Fiction, which discusses the political stance of Rushdie's fiction, the various influences on his work, and the textual strategies and techniques he employs, for political expression and cultural critique. The postmodern/post-colonial interface, the carnivalesque, and satire are major themes treated here and in the articles that follow, which also provide diverse other perspectives on Rushdie's thought and method. A number of essays have been commissioned specially for this volume. An appendix listing selected writings by Rushdie and articles on the Satanic Verses Affair is followed by a comprehensive bibliography annotating critical studies of Rushdie's work.

The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities. As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometimes perceived as a difficult writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. "Utterly Other Discourse" (a phrase from her 1984 novel "Amalgamemnon") provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays--some previously published, some written for this book--scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles.

Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

New from the author of The Lost Daughter Afia Satar is studious, modest, and devout. The daughter of a landholding family in northern Pakistan, Afia has enrolled in an American college with the dream of returning to her country as a doctor. But when a photo surfaces online of Afia holding hands with an American boy, she is suddenly no longer safe—even from the family that cherishes her. Rising sports star Shahid Satar has been entrusted by his family to watch over Afia in this strange New England landscape. He has sworn to protect his beloved sister from the dangerous customs of America, from its loose morals and easy virtue. Shahid was the one who convinced their parents to allow her to come to the United States. He never imagined he’d be ordered to cleanse the stain of her shame... READERS GUIDE INCLUDED

A look at the cultural, or intercultural, exchange that took place in the Silk Roads and the role this has played in the shaping of cultures and civilizations.

The relationship of myth to literature has largely been overshadowed in contemporary theory by perspectives of a linguistic or sociological orientation and by relativist, sometimes negatory, stances on all searches for meaning. This book attempts to show that myth criticism and critical theories of more recent provenance are not irreconcilable. While taking into consideration some of the more influential tenets of structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist and feminist theory, it applies a post-Jungian ('archetypal') approach to illustrating the perennial nature of a particular myth (the Fall of Man) in two main traditions (Mesopotamian and Christian) and in the contemporary novel in English. The discussions of five major novels by William Golding, Patrick White, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Wilson Harris not only serve to expand the mythological insights achieved in the first part of the book; they also suggest the incommensurability of imaginal, novelistic life with mythology's age-old intuitions about the human condition. Myth criticism emerges from this book as an irreplaceable vantage-point from which man's lapsarian predicament can be scrutinized synchronically as archaic wisdom, contemporary anxiety, and post-colonial commitment to the building of a new human city.