24-year-old Ali Sethi’s sprawling debut, The Wish Maker—a family saga about growing up in Pakistan—made this year’s list of Vogue’s top ten summer books. Check it out here. Sethi will read live at Powell’s City of Books at 7:30 pm tonight, Friday, June 19.
Let’s not beat around the bush, reader. It’s summer, and you need a good book.
But finding the right novel is hard. So why not let us do the work for you? We’re used to it. As a matter of fact, WW’s crack team of book reviewers (and by that I mean…I, me) have found this summer’s must-read, big-hit coming-of-age novel. And get this. It’s from Pakistan.
Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker (Riverhead Books, 420 pages, $25.95) is narrated by the quizzical Zaki Shirazi. Having lost his father before his own birth, Zaki is cast into the tumultuous world of his extended family in Lahore. Caught between an overbearing, conservative grandmother and a liberal magazine-editor mother, Shirazi finds solace in the close friendship of his adoptive sister, the mercurial Samar Api. And it is their relationship—foregrounded throughout the novel—that enables Shirazi to chart a course through his turbulent adolescence.
Sethi has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and in People Magazine in connection with his new book. It’s getting great reviews, and we predict you’ll dig it, too.
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Tags: Ali Sethi, Powell's, The Wish Maker
Thanks for the tip. I’ll get it.