Meatless Days: Introduction by the winner of the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction Kamila Shamsie

(Paperback)

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A masterly memoir of love, grief and longing in postcolonial Pakistan, with an introduction by Kamila Shamsie Meatless Days is a searing memoir of life in the newly-created country of Pakistan. When sudden and shocking tragedies hit the author's family two years apart, her personal crisis spirals into a wider meditation on universal questions- about being a woman when you're too busy being a mother or a sister or a wife to consider your own womanhood; about how it feels to begin life in a new language; about how our lives are changed by the people that leave them. This is a heart-breaking, hopeful and profound book that will get under your skin.

Reviews

Extraordinary... as an evocation of family love, with all its sharpness, pain and need, Meatless Days is almost faultless * New Statesman *
A jewel of insight and beauty * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
Some of the more heart-shaking writing about love and grief I've ever read -- Kamila Shamsie, from the introduction
The author has a gift for rendering her family with a few, deft strokes, turning them out as whole and complete as eggs -- Anita Desai
Dazzling... Suleri is a postcolonial Proust * Voice Literary Supplement *
Suleri writes with a surgical intellectual frankness... and a poetic precision which crisps the reader into paying absolute attention * London Review of Books *
A tour de force of memory and interpretation...What makes Meatless Days such an astonishing book is its corrosive effect on partitions of all kinds - between body and history, politics and poetry, language and experience, the East and the West. * Village Voice *
Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pakistani history, and deeply into the history of her family and friends. . . . The Suleri women at home in Pakistan make this book sing * New York Times Book Review *
An incredibly smart, dryly funny and hugely moving read * The Pool *
A bewitching memoir of loss... remarkable * The National *

Author Bio

Sara Suleri Goodyear, born Sara Suleri, is professor emeritus of English at Yale University. She is the author of Meatless Days, Boys Will Be Boys- A Daughter's Elegy and The Rhetoric of English India.