A lost classic of South Asian literature, in English for the first time · Translated from the Urdu by International Booker Prize–winning translator Daisy Rockwell
Afgar loses her parents to cholera before she is a year old, and is passed between grandmother, uncles and aunts through a turbulent orphaned childhood in the North-West Frontier. She reads everything she can reach. She grows into a young woman of formidable intellect, moving from the cloistered world of a mountain sanatorium towards the brink of departure for a doctorate at Cambridge.
She also wants to be loved, and this is where the trouble sits. Afgar measures every man she meets against the standards of her own restless mind, and finds each one wanting.
First published in Urdu in 1955, Nisar Aziz Butt's semi-autobiographical novel is possibly the first work by a Pashtun writer to appear in English translation. Witty, tender and quietly devastating, it is a radical portrait of female ambition and desire from a part of the world almost entirely absent from the literary canon. Banu Mushtaq calls it a book to be treasured; Musharraf Ali Farooqi calls it a masterpiece.
About the author and translator
Nisar Aziz Butt was born in 1927 in Mardan, near Peshawar, in the region then known as the North-West Frontier Provinces — now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.
Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer and translator from Hindi and Urdu. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi, as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022.
With a foreword by Aamer Hussein.
Edition details
- Harper Perennial India paperback, 384 pages
- For sale in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives only
- Published 9 September 2026
On the same shelf: Tomb of Sand and रेत-समाधि / Ret-Samadhi by Geetanjali Shree — also translated by Daisy Rockwell.
