Blue Dust

Blue Dust follows three generations of a family in Pakistan and the Middle East, tracing their relationships, dreams, hopes and fears. At its centre is a volatile, loving woman who struggles with her own insecurities in her dealings with her father, her husband and her sister. The world she is born into, with its social and religious expectations, ends up blurring her sense of who she is.

Her bond with her sister is one of the most enduring forces in the book and shapes her life and personality. Her daughter also plays a pivotal part, setting the emotional tone of the story and drawing out the gap between reality and perception, and the power of memory and dreams in how these people respond to what happens to them.

Through this family, the author also looks at class, religious and social divisions in Pakistan and the barriers they create. She writes about a society that perpetuates paedophilia and sexual repression while also ignoring them. The result is a misty, dream-like, touching and often bloody portrait of individual lives that speaks to wider concerns in Pakistani society. It is the author's debut novel.