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The National has published my review of Urdu-language author Qurratulian Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder, who penned a book many have called Urdu’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, has clear talent, but Fireflies is perhaps not the best book to show it off.

And here’s a quote from the review:

Though the majority of the action occurs over the course of just one decade, the book has an expansive sweep. Its cast of characters is huge, and a list of its many threads offers a distillation of 20th-century Indian history: the interaction of societal strata ranging from British colonials to Indian peasants; the story of Partition; conflicts among the region’s Hindus, Christians, and Muslims; and the domestic dramas of three young women growing up in a modernising nation. These elements are subsumed into what is essentially a story of young idealists trading their political struggles for middle-class families. For all the weighty ideas wrestled with in Fireflies, Hyder makes a valiant attempt to ground the story in the lives of its three young female leads: Deepali, the bourgeois daughter turned young communist; the feudal heiress Jehan Ara; and Rosie, the daughter of a Christian reverend converted from Hinduism. There is much to like here, but Hyder’s at times lively narrative is too often blanched by laborious prose that strains to serve its political subtext.

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