Meatless Days - Sara Suleri, Viking

Some of the more heart-shaking writing about love and 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 and 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 and profound book that will get under your skin. 'Extraordinary... as an evocation of family love, with all its sharpness, pain and need, Meatless Days is almost faultless' New Statesman