Showing all 3 books
A malfunctioning weathervane forces the wind to realign itself. A collector travels all over the world tracking down tools used in crimes against corpses. A gardener frets over the consequences of stealing the Navab of Lucknow's prized myna. Minutiae and mystery form the warp and weft of Naiyer Masud's densely woven, enchantingly hypnotic stories, combining precisely delineated characters and objects with accounts of inexplicable phenomena and the arcane arts. ...
Work is on in full swing in the Royal Peacock Garden to house a wondrous cage that would have forty hill mynas. Soon the cage is full of twittering birds and they are entrusted to Kale Khan’s care. But he steals a myna for his motherless daughter who has long been asking for one… Does Kale Khan receive a royal pardon… What lies in store for the beautiful city of Lucknow? Set in the times of the reign of Sultan Wajid Ali Shah, this is a poignant story of a ...
Readers and critics have compared the acclaimed Urdu writer Naiyer Masud to Kafka, Borges and Murakami. But it is best to speak of his style as pure Masud, for no other writer has rendered a fictional world quite like that of this master storyteller. His prose is spare and seductive and his stories have a shimmering, elusive quality. Although individually perfectly formed and complete, yet each story appears to have no beginning or end, drawing the reader into a ...