The Collaborator

With flashes of brilliance, tenderness and fury, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator does what fiction should. It makes you listen’ Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone.

Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and turned militant to bear arms against the Indian army. He would like to join them – but he cannot.

Instead, put in an impossible position by an Indian army Captain, he must cross into the shadowland between the opposing sides, a ghost walking among the dead. His fate, like that of his lost brothers, unknown . . .