Maps for Lost Lovers

'This is explosive stuff, providing a core conflict around which flit other stories, variations on themes of loneliness, exile, love found and more often lost ... That so much bleakness is rendered in such exquisite prose is this novel's other defining characteristic.'

'Two things raise this book from a prosaic work of social commentary into an illuminating piece of contemporary fiction: Mr Aslam's arresting prose that quietly and eloquently opens up the heart of Shamas and Kaukab's family, and the author's courage in questioning the more outrageous laws that are enacted in Islam's name ...Maps for Lost Lovers is a novel of extraordinary quality. Islamists would be foolish to try to make political mischief out of it, while western readers would be foolish to ignore such a carefully crafted work.'

'In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture - it gleams at the edges of even the deepest wounds. Perhaps this is why the novel never gets weighed down by all the sorrows it carries: there is such shimmering joy within it too.'

'But this book is more than your average British-Asian venting space. It is also a love song to Britain -the sheer beauty of trees, snowfall, birds, insects. Rife with ghost moths, garden tigers, early thorns, cinnabars, goldfinches, geraniums, rosehips and cherry trees, you will suddenly trip upon things like "blue fish scales, each resembling a boiled sweet sucked down to a sharp silver between tongue and roof of mouth".
A book after 11 years. Aslam's earlier novel Season of the Rainbirds won the Betty Trask Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and was long-listed for the Booker. This one has a lot to live up to , and it does. The novel may be a reminder of the 'issues' of multicultural Britain, but more than that, it is utter poetry.'

'Aslam manages to imbue the inner-city suburbs with a peculiar kind of exoticism, in some ways oddly reminiscent of Hardy's sensualisation of the West Country. Recommended to all fans of Rushdie, Naipaul and exquisite writing in general.'

'A richly poetic and poignant novel.'