Nadeem Aslam’s tale of honor killings, Maps for Lost Lovers, has been placed on the long list for the Booker Prize this year (via Kitabkhana). Novelist Kamila Shamsie reviewed the book in the Guardian:
[T]he most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas’s wife, Kaukub… she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin… a woman’s gold bracelet is composed of a series of semi-colons; dead tulips lean out of a bin like the necks of drunk swans; a falling icicle is a radiant dagger.
