Writer captures Pakistani history in a novel
by Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio
Pakistan is a relatively young country, formed by the partition of India in 1947.
Yet when Ali Sethi set out to explore his homeland's history for a creative writing class, he discovered relatively little of its complex multi-lingual cultural history had been written down.
St. Paul, Minn. — Sethi has tried to change that with his novel "The Wish Maker." The book has critics hailing him as a new international literary voice.
It's the story of four generations of a family living in Lahore in Pakistan, although much of the action is in the 1990s when Sethi (pronounced 'say-TEE') was a boy. He says as he wrote he had to wrestle with the complexities of Pakistan.
