Best Seller
Impunity
Hardcover
$31.00
Available on Jul 13, 2027 | 272 Pages
A girl awakens to the ruthlessness of her powerful family, and the complicity that sustains it
For seven-year-old Nyla, her family’s lush Karachi garden has always been domain enough. Then one day her father brings home a surprise: a girl whose rhyming name—Lyla—seems to confirm their instant sense of kinship even as she hints at a difficult life beyond the compound’s gates. But as suddenly as she arrives, Lyla is sent away, and Nyla understands that there is no one—not her adored father or aggrieved mother, not her many cousins, not even her brother, Middle, and certainly not intimidating Uncle—she can ask why. And yet this brief encounter plants a seed of knowing. Over the years it will steer Nyla’s fate, until at last she comes face to face with what it means to belong to a family where little is as it seems, that holds the sky up only over its own, and that regards anything less than blind allegiance as betrayal.
At once searingly intimate and propulsive, Impunity is Shamsie at her most affecting and most immersive.
For seven-year-old Nyla, her family’s lush Karachi garden has always been domain enough. Then one day her father brings home a surprise: a girl whose rhyming name—Lyla—seems to confirm their instant sense of kinship even as she hints at a difficult life beyond the compound’s gates. But as suddenly as she arrives, Lyla is sent away, and Nyla understands that there is no one—not her adored father or aggrieved mother, not her many cousins, not even her brother, Middle, and certainly not intimidating Uncle—she can ask why. And yet this brief encounter plants a seed of knowing. Over the years it will steer Nyla’s fate, until at last she comes face to face with what it means to belong to a family where little is as it seems, that holds the sky up only over its own, and that regards anything less than blind allegiance as betrayal.
At once searingly intimate and propulsive, Impunity is Shamsie at her most affecting and most immersive.
Author
Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Karachi, where she grew up. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at the University of Massachusetts she wrote In The City By The Sea, published by Granta Books UK in 1998. This first novel was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her 2000 novel Salt and Saffron led to Shamsie’s selection as one of Orange’s “21 Writers of the 21st Century.” With her third novel, Kartography, Shamsie was again shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses, won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Burnt Shadows, Shamsie’s fifth novel, has been longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated into a number of languages. Shamsie is the daughter of literary critic and writer Muneeza Shamsie, the niece of celebrated Indian novelist Attia Hosain, and the granddaughter of the memoirist Begum Jahanara Habibullah. A reviewer and columnist, primarily for the Guardian, Shamsie has been a judge for several literary awards including The Orange Award for New Writing and The Guardian First Book Award. She also sits on the advisory board of the Index on Censorship. For years Shamsie spent equal amounts of time in London and Karachi, while also occasionally teaching creative writing at Hamilton College in New York State. She now lives primarily in London.
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