This year, Pakistani writers have done something extraordinary: they’ve taken familiar terrains politics, memory, gender, nationhood and reimagined them with striking precision. What makes 2025’s releases remarkable is not only their subject matter, but the craftsmanship behind them. These are works by wordsmiths who understand restraint, irony and intimacy.
This year’s bookshelf is brimming with stories that are unafraid to ask difficult questions. Through history, poetry and fiction we step into a Pakistan goes beyond mangoes and chai to investigate its past and future.
Here’s what we’re reading now, and what we’re looking forward to next:
A Splintering (Fiction, 2025)
By Dur e Aziz Amna
Dur e Aziz Amna’s second novel, A Splintering (Duckworth Books), arrives after the success of her debut American Fever. Tara and her belligerent brother Lateef form the novel’s compelling core. Their lives unfold in painful parallel. The Guardian calls it a compelling read and notes ““passages of striking irony and insight into small, ordinary scenes.” Amna transforms domestic struggle into social critique. Patriarchal modes define everything here – even the terms of defiance.
Pakistan Lost: Ideas on the Idea of Pakistan (Non-fiction, 2025)
By Shehzad Ghias
The stand-up comic and podcaster steps into print with Pakistan Lost, a work that looks beyond humour to ask a deeply serious question: what does the idea of Pakistan mean today? Known for his unflinching political commentary and sharp wit, Ghias approaches national identity, language and community a performance and puzzle that keeps being rewritten by those in power.
Progressive Laws in Patriarchal Societies Law & Gender, 2025)
by Sara Malkani
Lawyer and activist Sara Malkani’s Progressive Laws in Patriarchal Societies examines how legal reform collides with lived reality. Drawing from her experience advocating for women’s rights, Malkani dissects the gap between constitutional promise and cultural enforcement. Her work offers not just legal critique but a moral call to imagine justice as something participatory, humane, and evolving.
An Incredible Journey of Pakistan (Non-fiction, 2025)
By Lt. Gen. (R) Talat Masood
Statesman’s memoir meets national history in Talat Masood’s An Incredible Journey of Pakistan. Drawing from decades of military and diplomatic experience, Masood charts the country’s transformation through its defining crises and recoveries. What makes his perspective singular is its duality: a man both inside the system and looking back at it. The book consists of eight core lessons along with two annexes, including Personal Milestones and Key Events and The Arab Spring and Its Implications for Pakistan.
Rebel English Academy (Fiction, 2025)
By Mohammad Hanif
No one dissects Pakistan’s absurdities quite like Mohammad Hanif. In Rebel English Academy, due later this year from Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton, Hanif returns to the late 1970s — a time when language, politics, and faith collided in unpredictable ways. The story follows a group of unlikely characters: a disillusioned soldier, a runaway, a progressive imam bound together by a school that shouldn’t exist: a “Rebel English Academy” built within a mosque compound.
We, The Mob: A Stream-of-Thought Exploration of Three Populist Uprisings (Non-fiction, forthcoming)
By Nadeem Farooq Paracha
In his upcoming work, historian and cultural critic Nadeem Farooq Paracha turns his lens on global populism, connecting uprisings in Washington D.C. (2021), Brasília (2023), and Islamabad (2023). Rather than treat these as eruptions of “people versus power,” Paracha suggests they are rival elites cloaked in populist language a continuation of his long fascination with ideology and myth.
For readers who have followed him through Points of Entry, Of Reason, Romance and Ruin, and Imran Khan: Myth of the Pakistani Middle Class, this promises to be his most globally expansive yet.
