Ali Sethi on writing The Wish Maker

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in July 1984.  A month later my father, then a bookseller, was arrested for publishing a book that was critical of the military.  This was the era of General Zia, who ruled Pakistan doggedly for eleven years—years during which the press was silenced, political leaders jailed and exiled, and women made to cover their heads on the one state-run TV channel, while the generals of the military led a lucrative, American-funded guerilla jihad against the Soviet Union in the mountains of neighboring Afghanistan.

In 1988 General Zia was killed in a plane crash.  The military was returning to its garrisons; an election was going to be held.  And Benazir Bhutto, the young female leader of the outlawed Pakistan People's Party, was expected to run for office and win.

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That was when my parents decided to start their own newspaper.  Democracy was returning after a decade of military rule, and my parents, like most people in Pakistan, were hopeful.

But the decade of democracy that followed was a time of turmoil.  The economy was crashing; the city of Karachi was burning with ethnic enmities; and the country's democratically elected leaders were accused of indifference, theft and corruption.  In May 1999 my father was abducted from our home by plainclothes policemen and handed over to the ISI, the military's spy agency.  The government announced that it was going to try him for treason (he was making a documentary film about the prime minister), and the military kept him prisoner for a month.

Clearly, elections alone hadn't solved our problems.

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Praise from the New York Times:

“[A] first rate novel.... Though distinctly restrained, Sethi’s prose evokes the comic mislocutions of Jonathan Safran Foer and the vertiginous mania of Zadie Smith.”

People Magazine says:

"Much as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan, this timely first novel, told through the eyes of a boy grappling with adolescence, brings to life the tumult of Pakistan. "

Watch Ali Sethi on The Tavis Smiley Show