TheRunaways

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the memoir about her father's life and assassination, Songs of Blood and Sword, was published to acclaim. Her most recent books are The Runaways, a novel, and New Kings of the World, a non-fiction reportage on popular culture and globalisation.

Anita Rose lives in one of Karachi's biggest slums, languishing in poverty but aware that a larger destiny awaits her. Monty, whose father owns half of Karachi, realizes that his privileged life will never be the same again when the enigmatic and rebellious Layla joins his school. And far away in Portsmouth, Sunny fits in nowhere, drifting without a purpose-until he meets his charismatic, suntanned cousin Oz whose smile makes Sunny feel found.

These three disparate lives will cross paths in the middle of a desert, a place where life and death walk hand-in-hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.

Timely . . . Ambitious . . . Bhutto's concerns are serious and unsentimental. She tracks how the experiences of poverty, disaffection and alienation become the pathways to Islamist extremism . . . this novel seems more pertinent than ever . . . A bold and probing novel, from a writer strikingly alert to something small and true: the disquietude of youth, the vulnerability and the foolishness - and how catastrophically it can be exploited.Highly topical . . . Bhutto writes with feeling and authority . . . She understands her male characters as much as her women, and is astute about the mix of bravado and insecurity that characterises young men's attitudes to sex . . . Bhutto displays a keen eye for the injustices and indignities of poverty . . . The Runaways offers an unflinching look at the key subjects of our time and the riveting story of three memorable characters . . . An involving and satisfying novel.The Runaways endeavours to show, with great compassion and earnestness, how young people in places like Britain and Pakistan come to cross over from the safety of the bourgeois quotidian of home to the bloody exhilaration of elaborately staged deaths in the desert . . . Fatima Bhutto has the two qualities that are most difficult for a truly great writer to acquire: her eye and ear pick up the slightest detail of the human condition, and she loves her characters and this flawed and ugly world of ours perhaps as much as Majnu loved Layla . . . The Runaways is a timely intervention by a talented voice.Brave . . . Visceral . . . Bhutto excels in [evoking] the inner spaces of her characters: their loneliness, longings and loss. All of it weaves into a tale profound and resonant.A shocking, moving, and deeply compassionate novel.