Author: Bapsi Sidhwa
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 245
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140148114
Description
An exotic cliffhanger from passion, power, lust, sensuality, cruelty and murder, this novel shows a marvelous feel for imagery at a breathless pace.
Zaitoon, an orphan, is adopted by Qasim, who has left the isolated hill town where he was born and made a home for the two of them in the glittering decadent city of Lahore. As the years pass, Qasim makes a fortune but grows increasingly nostalgic about his life in the mountains. Impulsively, he promises Zaitoon in marriage to a man of his tribe.
But for Zaitoon, giving up the civilized city life she remembers to become the bride of this hard, inscrutable husband proves traumatic to the point where she decides to run away, though she knows that by the tribal code, the punishment for such an act is death.
PRAISE FOR BAPSI SIDHWA:
Bapsi Sidhwa is a powerful and dramatic novelist who knows how to flesh out a story. - London Times
The Pakistani Bride is fast moving and interesting enough. Sidhwa's genius, however, lies in her style. She has a rare sense of fun that is irresistible. The naturalness of her descriptions of the physical - be it the look, the body or the sexual act - is a unique feature among the subcontinent's women writers. - Far Eastern Economic Review
The Pakistani Bride reveals to the western reader a way of life that is completely alien. Sidhwa writes with the same vivacity that made the author's first novel, The Crow Easters so memorable. - Telegraph
There is plenty of vivid and forceful writing here; the smothering rules of a repressive religion are seen in action - the fetid female 'Cencanna', the suppressed and violent sexuality of the men. - Sunday Telegraph
THE AUTHOR: