Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir

(Paperback)

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Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and Winner of the Crossword Prize for Non-fiction

Curfewed Night is a passionate and important book a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman Rushdie
Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir angrier, more violent, more hopeless was never far away.

In 2003 Peer, now a young journalist, left his job and returned to his homeland. Drawing a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and her people a mother forced to watch her son hold an exploding bomb, politicians living in refurbished torture chambers, picturesque villages riddled with landmines this is above all, a story of what it really means to return home and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.

Lyrical, spare, gut-wrenching and intimate, Curfewed Night is a powerful and intensely moving debut, combining the insight of a journalist with the prose of a poet.

Reviews

'A passionate and important book a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman Rushdie

One of the finest books Ive read this yearBasharat Peers memoir reminds us why peace in Kashmir is important, not just to India and Pakistan, but to the world. Hari Kunzru, Guardian

'Curfewed Night is the finest book I have read on the contemporary Kashmir conflict literary, humane, clear-eyed and reliable. Basharat Peer has given voice, unforgettably, to a generation of Kashmiris who have never been heard, but who should be.' Steve Coll

An extraordinary memoir that does a great deal to bring the Kashmir conflict out of the realm of political rhetoric between India and Pakistanone of the great achievements of Curfewed Night is its seamless mingling of memoir and reportageIt is a formidable challenge to tell the stories of Kashmir's suffering without numbing the readers' senses, and that Peer is able to do so is testament to his gifts and and sensitivity as a writer Guardian

Fresh and poignantPeer's tone is nonjudgmentalCurfewed Night has made his own valuable contribution to Orwell's mission making the political writing an art The Economist

Author Bio

Basharat Peer was born in Kashmir in 1977. He studied political science at Aligarh Muslim University and journalism at Columbia University. He has worked as a reporter at Rediff and Tehelka and has written for various publications including the Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and Foreign Affairs where he was assistant editor. He is currently based in New York.