Of a city and people raped by the power.

This is not an easy read. Depicting the fate and people of Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas close to the Afghan border is raw and hurting when presenting the lives of ordinary people in the hard times, the cycle of hurt and revenge.
I am coming out of its pages both enlightened and sad. And I can understand the story too much, as my post-communist country was also raped by the power.
So I understand the three brothers and their women - Aman Erum believing he has the cards to win the power-play with the officials, Sikander realizing his fear and Hayat living in the past full of injustice and trying to avenge for it; Mina, losing her mind after the violent death in the family and Samarra, the feisty one, full of anger.

May God bless this torn country and gives the people living there the hope and His peace.

Although the action of the novel takes place on a single day (a contemporary Eid), in a single town (a small village in the tribal region of Pakistan) and a single family, the narrative winds through the generation ago that the now deceased patriarch was a never apprehended separatist leader, the five years ago when the eldest son went to business school in New Jersey at the cost of becoming an informant, the two years ago that the youngest brother became radicalized by the brutalization by the secret police of the woman eldest brother intended to return to and marry and the year ago that the physician middle brother lost his toddler son to a bomb attack on his hospital by a Sunni militia (and subsequently lost his wife to an obsessive madness manifested in going to the funerals of children killed in drone strikes). On this particular Eid, the Minister of Defense is coming to town to oversee the induction of 400 tribal men into the national army--the climax of decades of assimilation policies including a university and internet access (which can just as easily be turned against what the state wants them to do).