In A Piece of the Moon, we visit a world of familial bonds riddled with dreams, unmapped journeys, and divine interventions. Framed together as in a group photograph, each character is given a voice including the author who others himself as Dillan and remains omnipresent. Sitting with them as family members, we share food and listen to charismatic stories with asides from history, politics, World War II, and the partition of India. Within one frame, a collage of many frames breaks the linearity of the narrative. Time overlaps; past and present jostle for a third space; the ordinary becomes extraordinary; simple things assume archetypal shapes; and daily activities morph into parables. Dillan?s journey becomes a voyage into his inner darkness; and his autobiography, the Everman?s story. The camera clicks, and they all move out of the frame and fade slowly into the sepia of time.
The family tree grows with each chapter. Weathered by the springs of youth, autumnal sorrow of human loss, the tree throngs with birds of memories and the fruits of joy and suffering. And we, under its shade, rest briefly preparing for the next departure.
A Piece of the Moon is a literary masterpiece. A must read!
? Sarmad Sehbai
In his magnum opus, A Piece of the Moon, Mushir Anwar paints a lush landscape of the subcontinent?s culture and traditions. His exquisite storytelling, suffused with his trademark whimsy, is the perfect foil for the questing philosophical ruminations that thread through the narrative. At the heart of this novel is a teeming familial setup of singular characters who mirror the interconnectedness and fracturing of pre-Partition Hindustan and post-Partition Pakistan. Anwar renders a bygone era with remarkable precision that imparts immediacy and invites immersion. Through family vignettes, we are brought to spaces of kinship and solitariness. His reflections on love, loss, the nature of the Divine itself make for transcendental prose-the reader ever-aware of how transitory and ephemeral our times are and how vital the treasury of memory.
? Zakia R. Khwaja
author of Stones Hold Water
In A Piece of the Moon, Mushir Anwar turns the ordinary biography of a South Asian Muslim family into an extraordinary tale of tragic resilience in the face of history, politics, and social upheavals. Magical, humorous, and keenly insightful, the novel explores the complexities that define a person, a bustling and tightly knit household, and a cultural community negotiating its bearings. To date, this superb novel is incomparable to any work of Anglophone fiction from Pakistan.
