Maps for Lost Lovers - Softcover

Maps for Lost Lovers is a stunningly brave and searingly brutal novel charting a year in the life of a working class community from the subcontinent--a group described by author Nadeem Aslam as "Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian and Sri Lankans living in a northern town". The older residents, who have left their homelands for the riches of England, have communally dubbed it Dasht-e-Tanhaii, which roughly translates as "the wilderness of solitude" or "the desert of loneliness". As the seasons change, from the first crystal flakes of snow that melt into "a monsoon raindrop", we slowly learn the fate of Jugnu and Chanda, a couple whose disappearance is rumoured to have been a result of their fatal decision to live in sin in a community where the phrase holds true meaning.

This uncompromisingly honest--and often uncomfortable to read--story is told through the eyes of Jugnu's brother's family who live next door. Shamas is director of the local Community Relations Council; a liberal, educated man he still mourns the passing of communism and yearns for passion in his later years. His wife Kaukub, daughter of a Pakistani cleric, is also in mourning for the passing of her devout Muslim upbringing and is forced to watch her three children turn "native". She tries increasingly desperate measures to turn them back to Islam. Pakistani-born Nadeem Aslam skilfully intertwines myths and legends with a harsh, modern reality. Tragic sub-plots of Romeo-and-Juliet proportions abound. And while some of the extended descriptive passages sit uneasily on the page and, towards the end, several rants against Islam forced through the mouths of characters become thinly-veiled lectures, nevertheless Maps for Lost Lovers is an epic work and an important milestone in British literature that deserves to be widely read by all multicultural societies seeking mutual tolerance and understanding. --Carey Green

'This is explosive stuff, providing a core conflict around which flit other stories, variations on themes of loneliness, exile, love found and more often lost ... That so much bleakness is rendered in such exquisite prose is this novel's other defining characteristic.' Author: Hephzibah Anderson Source: Observer Published On: 2005-06-19

'Two things raise this book from a prosaic work of social commentary into an illuminating piece of contemporary fiction: Mr Aslam's arresting prose that quietly and eloquently opens up the heart of Shamas and Kaukab's family, and the author's courage in questioning the more outrageous laws that are enacted in Islam's name ...Maps for Lost Lovers is a novel of extraordinary quality. Islamists would be foolish to try to make political mischief out of it, while western readers would be foolish to ignore such a carefully crafted work.' Source: Economist

'In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture - it gleams at the edges of even the deepest wounds. Perhaps this is why the novel never gets weighed down by all the sorrows it carries: there is such shimmering joy within it too.' Source: Guardian

'But this book is more than your average British-Asian venting space. It is also a love song to Britain -the sheer beauty of trees, snowfall, birds, insects. Rife with ghost moths, garden tigers, early thorns, cinnabars, goldfinches, geraniums, rosehips and cherry trees, you will suddenly trip upon things like "blue fish scales, each resembling a boiled sweet sucked down to a sharp silver between tongue and roof of mouth".
A book after 11 years. Aslam's earlier novel Season of the Rainbirds won the Betty Trask Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and was long-listed for the Booker. This one has a lot to live up to , and it does. The novel may be a reminder of the 'issues' of multicultural Britain, but more than that, it is utter poetry.'

Source: India Today

'Aslam manages to imbue the inner-city suburbs with a peculiar kind of exoticism, in some ways oddly reminiscent of Hardy's sensualisation of the West Country. Recommended to all fans of Rushdie, Naipaul and exquisite writing in general.' Source: Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

'A richly poetic and poignant novel.' Source: Independent

'It is an extraordinary work, echoing Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie, but entirely, and unmistakably, the product of a wholly original mind ... I can't think of may works of fiction that are more directly concerned with probing the ethics and truths of a religion, and holding them so severely to account.' Source: Herald (Glasgow)

'Aslam has surpassed Rushdie's fireworks with dignified restraint; he exposes without resorting to ridicule or caricature... That a novel may balance the beauty of the natural world and the ugliness of human nature with such delicacy is extraordinary... Through the opulence of his writing and the darkness of his message Aslam quite brilliantly and shockingly seduces his reader ... Beautiful and only too real, this story born of romance and pain matches its artistry with courage. It is an important novel and also a very fine one.' Author: Eileen Battersby Source: Irish Times