Nonfiction

It’s the mid twentieth century, and British control over north east Africa is failing. Sudanese cotton tycoon Mahmoud Abuzeid, awarded the title Bey by Egypt’s King Farouk, is pulled between his two wives: They belonged to different sides of the saraya, to different sides of him.

‘The chief problem for a story writer’, Kureishi recently wrote about American writer John Cheever, ‘particularly when it comes to a collection, is that of variety, especially if the reader wants to consume the stories in one go:

Storytellers are magicians. Twenty years after publication of his entrancing Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie has created a sequel in Luka and the Fire of Life.

Birthday Issue Launch, Schools Project:

To celebrate the magazine’s 30th birthday, Wasafiri has been looking forward, working with a group of young students who may become tomorrow’s writers, journalists and editors, on a schools publishing project.

Natasha Soobramanien Seldom Seen, by Sarah Ridgard Hutchinson, London, 2012, hbk, 256pp, £14.99, 9780091944124, www.randomhouse.co.uk … Set in Suffolk in the 1980s, this wonderful novel is about how our secrets shape us.

Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last twenty-five years, according to a survey of international writers specially commissioned by Wasafiri as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009.

Toby Litt Building Stories, by Chris Ware Jonathan Cape, London, 2012, hbk, 246pp, £30, 9780224078122 www.vintage-books.co.uk … Chris Ware must get fairly bored with being called a genius. But I can’t help it – I get more emotion from a single panel of Ware’s than I do out of many entire novels.

On 3 October 2012, to mark the launch of Wasafiri’s Special Issue, ‘Britain and India:

Following on from Marius Kociejowski’s contribution to Wasafiri (an interview with Brian Chikwava in issue 67) we interviewed the writer in a special online feature. Marius Kociejowski is a Cheltenham Prize-winning poet, essayist and travel writer living in London.

Daisy Hasan The Collaborator, by Mirza Waheed Viking, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9780670918959, www.penguin.co.uk … Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator focuses on the story of a young Gujjar boy recruited to collaborate with an official in the Indian army in the Kashmir Valley.

Award-winning Pakistani author, Bina Shah's short story, 'Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan', features in issue 65. Bina talks to Wasafiri's Nisha Obano about her writing, her journalism, the influence of Karachi and the growing tension in Pakistan upon her work … Nisha Obano  Bina…

Moniza Alvi Ten:

When Wasafiri turned 25 in 2009, 25 authors were asked to select an influential book from, or upon, the last 25 years. In addition, Wasafiri asked its own Editorial Team and Board what their suggestions might be.

Wasafiri Editor, Susheila Nasta, selected her top ten books for the Guardian in 2009. 'The tragic-comic creation of a black city of words that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens is a must.