Typhoon

Qaisra Shahraz

Author of The Holy Woman

Typhoon is a riveting family saga of deceit. The long awaited second novel by the best selling author of The Holy Woman.

'You enter room after inner room in this book so full of vivid detail about the lives and loves, the duties and desires in Muslim family life living in Chiragpur, a village on the subcontinent. These are rooms and stories few people in he West know, care to enter or understand. They could begin that adventure with this novel.'

- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

'Gripping, hugely involving and very satisfying to read.'

- Kate Mosse

Qaisra Shahraz was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. She read English and Classical Civilizations at the University of Manchester. Later she gained two Masters Degrees in European Literature and in Script Writing from Salford University. Qaisra is an award-winning short fiction writer and has written extensively for magazines and newspapers as well as number of television scripts and drama serials. Her acclaimed fourteen episode drama serial Dil Hee to Hai has been produced in Pakistan and shown all around the world.

In her other career, she is a lecturer, trainer and College Inspector for OFSTED and the Adult Learning Inspectorate. Qaisra lives in Manchester with her family. Typhoon  is her second novel and a sequel to The Holy Woman. She is currently working on her third.

Excerpt

Typhoon is set in  Chiragpur, a Pakistani village warped in time, space and guilt, whose inhabitants are still traumatized by what happened some twenty years earlier in a courtroom (kacheri).

With the arrival of a beautiful stranger from the city, the villagers are helplessly swept along by a typhoon-like series of events and become buried under the burden of their guilt. Closely guarding their small silk parcels containing a lock of a woman’s hair, they all hope to return it to its rightful owner and beg her forgiveness.

Typhoon is a tragic tale of three young women, each one demonized by their past: Naghmana – the glamorous stranger from the city; Chaudharani Kaniz – the village land baron, and Gulshan – the innocent wife. One is caught in the arms of another woman’s husband in the middle of the night; another was raped in her youth; and the third woman’s world fell apart as she lost her husband, before her eyes, to a total stranger and her mother vowed revenge. For all three there is no escape from what fate has in store...