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  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241342473
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Meatless Days

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




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.

  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241342473
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Praise for Meatless Days

A bewitching memoir of loss... remarkable

The National

A jewel of insight and beauty

Los Angeles Times Book Review

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

An incredibly smart, dryly funny and hugely moving read

The Pool

Dazzling... Suleri is a postcolonial Proust

Voice Literary Supplement

Extraordinary... as an evocation of family love, with all its sharpness, pain and need, Meatless Days is almost faultless

New Statesman

Some of the more heart-shaking writing about love and grief I've ever read

Kamila Shamsie, from the introduction

Suleri writes with a surgical intellectual frankness... and a poetic precision which crisps the reader into paying absolute attention

London Review of Books

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

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