The Empty Room
In 1970s Karachi, where violence and political and social uncertainty are on the rise, a beautiful and talented painter, Tahira, tries to hold her life together as it Shatters around her. Her marriage is quickly revealed to be a trap from which there appears no escape. Accustomed to the company of her brother Waseem and friends, Andaleep and Safdar, who are activists, writers and thinkers, Tahira struggles to adapt to her new world of stifling conformity and to fight for her identity as a woman and an artist. Shortedlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019 and re-issued by Quattro Books in a new North American edition.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Sadia Abbas is associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of At Freedom's Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, winner of the MLA first book award, and co-editor (with Jan Howard of the RISD museum) of Extraordinary Realities, a volume on Shahzia Sikander's art. She has written numerous essays on subjects including Jesuit poetics and Catholic martyrdom in Early Modern English poetry, neoliberalism and the Greek debt crisis, Pakistani art, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, and Jewish converts to Islam and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. She has also written essays and opinion pieces for Dawn and Daily Times (the Pakistani dailies), Naya Daur, OpenDemocracy, CommonDreams and TANK magazine. She is currently completing, Space in Another Time: An Essay on Ruins, Monuments and the Management of Modern Life about the connected afterlives of ruins and onuments in India, Greece and the New World and their role in the production and control of racial, religious and ethnic identities. At Rutgers-Newark she also directs the multi-media and multi-disciplinary series, "Postcolonial Questions and Performances."
