What Will You Give For This Beauty

Ali Akbar Natiq

Translated by

Ali Madeeh Hashmi

Hamish Hamilton

224 pages, Rs. 399

The Urdu writer Ali Akbar Natiq started his working life as a mason, and has recently emerged as a storyteller of exceptional talent and power. In this, his debut collection, he depicts the robust rhythms of the Punjab countryside, with undercurrents of violence and poverty, as they play out in feuds and feasts, hunts and marriages, mobs and floods, elopements and gossip. Acrobats, holy men, thieves, peasants, landowners, masons and courtesans populate these darkly ironic stories.