Thinner Than Skin

“Smart, fierce and poignant. Perhaps the most exciting novel yet by this very talented writer.” MOHSIN HAMID Advance Praise for Thinner than Skin “In gorgeous prose, Khan writes about Pakistan, a land of breathtaking beauty, and the complex relationships between people who are weighted with grief and estrangement. As her characters’ lives play out against the backdrop of the external world whose violence gradually closes in on them, Khan brilliantly probes the fatal limitations of human understanding. A novel of great lucidity and tenderness, filled with splendid descriptions of the land, the people who have always inhabited it, and those who are irresistibly drawn to it.” Thérèse Soukar Chehade, author of Loom (winner of the 2011 Arab American Book Award for Fiction) Thinner than Skin is a riveting novel about identity and belonging. It’s also a love story: between Nadir, a Pakistani man trying to make his way as a photographer in America, and Farhana, a Pakistani American woman who wants to return to a country she’s never seen. Together Nadir and Farhana journey to northern Pakistan, accompanied by one of her colleagues — who will join her in studying that country’s extraordinary glaciers — and by Nadir’s oldest friend. But they are not the only interlopers here: a suspect in a recent bombing has arrived just before them, and the authorities’ hunt for him casts a dangerous shadow over their journey. It is here, in this magnificent landscape — where glaciers are born of mating ice — that a chance meeting with a young nomad will change their lives, and the lives of those around them, forever. Thinner than Skin is a haunting tribute to these lands, and to the nomadic life of the indigenous people there, where China encroaches and Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Russians, Chinese, and Afghans all come together to trade. It is a work of piercing beauty and intelligence, and an urgent novel for our times.