The Paradise of Food

Winner of JCB Prize for Literature 2022 The Paradise of Food is landmark Urdu classic translated for the first time by Khalid Jawed, one of the most original and extraordinary writers in Urdu today. It tells the story of a middle-class Muslim joint family over a span of fifty years. As India – and Islamic culture – hardens, the narrator, whose life we follow from boyhood to old age, struggles to find a place for himself, at odds in his home and in the world outside. But to describe the novel in its plot is to do its originality no justice. In this profoundly daring work – tense, mysterious, even unfathomable on occasion – Jawed builds an atmosphere of gloom and grotesqueness that penetrates deep into the dark heart of middle-class Muslims today. Superbly translated, The Paradise of Food is a novel like no other.