' Some of the more heart-shaking writing about love & grief I've ever read' Kamila Shamsie from the introduction Meatless Days is a searing memoir of life in the newly-created country of Pakistan When sudden & shocking tragedies hit the author's family two years apart her personal crisis spirals into a wider meditation on universal questions about being a woman when you're too busy being a mother or a sister or a wife to consider your own womanhood; about how it feels to begin life in a new language; about how our lives are changed by the people that leave them This is a heart-breaking hopeful & profound book that will get under your skin' Extraordinary as an evocation of family love with all its sharpness pain & need Meatless Days is almost faultless' New Statesman