A Case of Exploding Mangoes
by Mohammed Hanif
Everyone wants to kill General Zia. Someone succeeds.
For you if
you want to understand Pakistan's military politics through a comedy that takes the absurdity completely seriously
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Pakistan, 1988. General Zia ul-Haq's plane explodes shortly after takeoff, killing everyone aboard including the US Ambassador. Hanif writes a dark comedy of competing assassination plots — the CIA, Inter-Services Intelligence, a junior air force officer, a crow, possibly the mangoes — that converges on that explosion. He treats Pakistan's most beloved military dictator with a savage irreverence that would have been dangerous to publish in Pakistan, and uses the farce to dispatch from inside Pakistan's relationship with its own military history: the coups, the executions, the American money, the permanent state within the state. The funniest political novel on this shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Pakistan • South Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Pakistani author
- Topics
- zia-ul-haq assassination
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