The Chronicle

Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq is the backdrop for this novel by Intizar Husain, a period the book treats as frightening and oppressive. At its centre is Ikhlaq, who is trying to put together a home for himself in Lahore while the world around him turns strange, comic and often painful by turns.

Ikhlaq's own story runs alongside another one. He has come across the tazkirah, a chronicle kept by his family, which traces the line of its members and the grand houses they once lived in. Reading it, he feels drawn to add the final chapter himself, an account of his own life and the age he lives through.

The tazkirah reaches back to Persia, and it becomes a kind of sounding board for Ikhlaq as his circumstances keep shifting. Past and present echo one another, and the long history of the family gives shape to his search for a place of his own.

Husain blends the manner of Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic myth and legend with brisk, modern prose. The result is a novel that moves easily between registers and shows his command of many ways of telling a story.