shahnazbashir.com

The Half Mother (Hachette, 2014)

Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016)

Reviews

Praise for The Half Mother

A debutante author goes beyond the headlines for the other side of the Kashmir story.

—Forbes magazine

Waiting as a condition of trauma defines the existence of many of the characters in [Kashmir] novels. This is probably best illustrated in Shahnaz Bashir’s debut novel The Half Mother.

—Los Angeles Review of Books

The love of a mother for her disappeared son finds such an expression in The Half Mother, that all else loses significance.

—Guardian

Widely lauded in literary circles for its bold new voice…

—New Asian Writing

Finding the truth in fiction.

—Hindustan Times

Bashir draws a picture of idyll with tenderness… His language is uneven, at its best when it evokes the terrain.

—The Indian Express

The novel has those unique strengths so missing in our fiction today… The Half Mother brings to light one of the greatest human tragedies of the covert war in Kashmir.”

—The Hindu

Realistic dose of fiction.

—The Asian Age

…lyrical descriptions and minute details of settings and places point at his [Shahnaz’s] ability to conjure images of that place and time.”

—Business Standard

…the narrative is so captivating with details of real places and incidents.

—Women’s Web

The Half Mother goes beyond headlines and misinformation to bring you an insider’s view of Kashmir.

—Bangalore Mirror

As far as the aspects of the art of narration and the power of description are concerned, The Half Mother is certainly in a different league… The book impels the reader, at once, to admire the grandeur of graphic artistic expression…such a wonderful work of fiction from the humungous mass of the realities of Kashmir tragedy.

—Greater Kashmir

It becomes almost impossible for the reader to read through the narration without gasping for breath and without trying hard to hold back the tears.

—Rising Kashmir

The Half Mother adds a nuanced layer to the local narrative, caught in the uncertainty of life and death. Bashir has painted the pain…in his debut novel.

—HARDNEWS

A moving novel.

—Kashmir Monitor

A mother’s nightmarish quest for her missing son.

—Firstpost

The prose does take you into the heart of Kashmir…

—Millennium Post

Only great writers can delve deep into the plight and psyche of their characters… Shahnaz grips you with his straight crafted sentences.”

—Kashmir Life

…these stories need to be told–they are screaming to be told. The challenges would require deft handling of the content and mastering the craft of storytelling. Shahnaz Bashir’s debut novel The Half Mother does all these and more.

—Reviews

One of the most remarkable features of this novel is its sublime interpretation of motherly affection being tormented by the arrogance of conflict so adversely gripping Kashmir.

—Kashmir Dispatch

The book is graphically written, with a passion that transports the reader into the emotional world of the mother searching for her son.

—The Citizen

We are introduced to a brittle Haleema, wishing for death. Bashir describes her home poetically, filled with loneliness and heartache.

—Writerati

The Half Mother marks the daring debut of Shahnaz Bashir, another rising star in the literary firmament of Kashmir…lavishly elegant and delicately beautiful. The way the author has entwined beauty and pain in this book never allows the reader to be at ease…highly recommended and a must read. The book is so interesting and engrossing that one remains glued to it till the end.

—The Criterion

The description of Haleema’s struggles for her son is truly heart wrenching and you seriously start wishing that at least now, after all the sufferings, she gets some happiness. The author writes seamlessly and effortlessly and the narration is simple yet it paints a picture of sorrow-filled beauty.

—The Tales Pensieve

The novel is structured in a manner that blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political… The fact that Bashir chooses to focus on the rawness and authenticity of experience imparts integrity and power to the narrative.

—The Book Review

Bashir intimately knows what he is writing about… A trailblazing, brilliant novel, The Half Mother is a powerful unflinching work that will leave the readers shaken to the core.

—Critical Muslim

Praise for Scattered Souls

There are easy comparisons with Manto in the often-shocking glibness with which Bashir lays bare a character’s innermost feelings, or with Chekov in the rootedness of the characters to their circumstances. What he shares most with such illustrious predecessors however is the way his stories feel authentic and historical…

—The Asian Age

With its focus on personal tragedy in times of political conflict, Bashir’s writing bears shades of Manto. The stories are laced with irony and the reader is confronted with the ludicrousness of it all… There are no beautiful sunsets here; the sun ‘slumps’ behind buildings, instead.

—The Hindu

Bashir’s Scattered Souls weaves together the ordinary and not-so-ordinary lives of a conflict-ridden people of a scenic territory brutalised by the decades of unending violence.

—Times of India

Unassuming yet intellectually tinged.

—Tehelka

Scattered Souls is a place to start if we wish to step out of our ignorance of how people in many parts of the world are forced to live in a constant churning of lies, fear, violence, human will to power, and human failure to rise above it.

—Deccan Herald

…touching, disturbing, and frighteningly intimate. Reading Scattered Souls is to experience catharsis.

—Scroll.in

Shahnaz’s ability to carry out lost and forgotten voices by digging through competing and hegemonic narratives is quite laudable. His literary eye transcends beyond the facade of ‘appearance’. His choice of words is captivating and possesses what Bertrand Russell delightfully calls ‘power of persuasion’. They encompass a powerful magnetic effect that won’t let you exit unless you go through the entire book painstakingly.

—Greater Kashmir

Shahnaz allows his narrators speak in terse, inornate ‘journalistic’ prose. Such detached narration has earned Shahnaz a comparison with Manto, and it is rather a well-deserved comparison.

—Wande Magazine

Short story The Gravestone selected in the “Greatest” collections

Award Citations

MUSE INDIA YOUNG WRITER AWARD 2015 JURY CITATION FOR THE WINNING NOVEL THE HALF MOTHER

Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother is an elegant narrative set in, and reflecting upon, the schisms and anguish of a claustrophobic and violently circumscribed world. It offers us an entry point into historical circumstances of unimaginable turbulence, in which lives are shattered in the everyday course of events; it permits us to engage with the strategies of survival that people attempt to apply to such a traumatic experience. This is a novel about the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives led in the times of a new and precarious normality.

Bashir speaks with assurance from a location and preoccupation which is distant from the metropolitan centres and urbane milieu of Anglophone Indian fiction.

THE CITIZEN DAILY’ S TALENT OF THE YEAR AWARD 2016 -2017 JURY CITATION FOR THE WINNING NOVEL SCATTERED SOULS

Shahnaz Bashir’s stories are graphic, photographs in words, poignantly capturing various aspects of the troubled life in Kashmir. Bashir’s Scattered Souls is not just a collection of stories but essentially a vivid and powerful narrative on Kashmir.