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Forthcoming

FIVE QUEEN'S ROAD

Sorayya's new novel, FIVE QUEEN'S ROAD, will be published by Penguin India in early 2008.

FIVE QUEEN'S ROAD is a novel that weaves together family saga, memoir, and national history. The house, Five Queen's Road, initially built by an Englishman in Lahore, Pakistan, is shared between a Hindu landlord, a Muslim tenant and his family, and eventually, a foreign daughter-in-law who joins them. Irene, a Dutch woman scarred by war-stricken Maastricht and Amsterdam, becomes part of the family and all slowly discover that they share more than imagined. The novel is about memory and family and surviving tragedies like the 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and World War II in Europe.

US Edition of NOOR

NOOR is a powerful and poignant story of memory, family, tragedy, and forgiveness. Set in modern-day Islamabad, Pakistan, the book depicts an extraordinary child who enables her mother, Sajida, and her grandfather, Ali, to confront the pasts they have chosen to suppress. Through Noor’s artwork, her family members are transported through their haunted memories of the 1970 cyclone that claimed the lives of a million people and the violent atrocities of the 1971 conflict between East and West Pakistan that eventually created the independent nation of Bangladesh. As Noor’s drawings bring to life sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of the past, Noor’s family is forced to admit to the betrayals and disillusionments that they thought had been buried with time. Moving, heartbreaking, and unsettling by turns, NOOR is a novel about the horrors of war, the power of forgiveness, and, most important, the strength of the human spirit.

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Sorayya’s story, "The Beginning of Five Queen’s Road", is included in Bapsi Sidhwa’s anthology, CITY OF SIN AND SPLENDOUR: WRITINGS ON LAHORE. The anthology was published in 2005 by Penguin India and Oxford University Press, Karachi.

Other contributors include:

EMMA DUNCAN, journalist at The Economist and author of BREAKING THE CURFEW, which examines Pakistani politics and society, FAIZ AHMAD FAIZ, Pakistan’s most famous poet and a prominent journalist and activist, ZULFIKAR GHOSE, a novelist and poet who is the author of many books, including THE LOSS OF INDIA, JETS FROM ORANGE, THE MEMORY OF ASIA, THE TRIPLE MIRROR OF THE SELF, CONFESSIONS OF A NATIVE-ALIEN, a trilogy whose first book is THE INCREDIBLE BRAZILIAN: THE NATIVE, and THE MURDER OF AZIZ KHAN, SARA SULERI GOODYEAR, author of a memoir MEATLESS DAYS and THE RHETORIC OF ENGLISH INDIA, MOHSIN HAMID, author of MOTH SMOKE, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a runner-up for the PEN-Hemingway Award, AAMER HUSSAIN author of MIRROR TO THE SUN, THE BLUE DIRECTION, CACTUS TOWN, and the most recent, TURQUOISE, SAADAT HASAN MANTO the leading Urdu short-story writer of the twentieth century, Bina Shah author of WHERE THEY DREAM IN BLUE, THE 786 CYBERCAFE, and the short story collection, ANIMAL MEDICINE, KHUSHWANT SINGH, India’s best known writer and the author of two dozen books which include TRAIN TO PAKISTAN, DELHI, THE COMPANY OF WOMEN, and the most recent, DEATH AT MY DOORSTEP, ADAM ZAMEENZAD, author of many novels including THE THIRTEENTH HOUSE, MY FRIEND MATT AND HENA THE WHORE, and LOVE, BONES AND WATER.