Overview

""There are countries people visit for the beaches. There are countries people visit for the ruins. And then there are countries people visit to understand why they've been told not to visit them. Pakistan is emphatically in that third category."" Tudor Finneran went anyway. Pakistan is the world's fifth most populous nation, a nuclear power that can't reliably keep the lights on, a country of 230 million people that the rest of the world thinks about mainly when something explodes. It has four military coups, a blasphemy law that can turn a rumour into a death sentence, and - this part doesn't make the news - some of the most extraordinary food, landscape, and human warmth on earth. This is the Pakistan that almost nobody writes about honestly: a place where your taxi driver is called Saddam Hussein and is entirely unbothered by this, where the tea is better than anything England has produced in thirty years, where a stranger will feed you lunch before you've told them your name, and where - in certain specific locations along the Khyber Pass - you put your phone away, compose your face into something neutral, and walk with a very particular kind of care. Pakistan is raw in the way the modern world has largely stopped being raw. The forces that shape human life - faith, family, obligation, honour, survival, joy - press directly on people here without the consumer-friendly interfaces the West has built around them. Spend time in it and the few centimetres between your ears become permanently different. In this book, Tudor Finneran takes you from the megacity chaos of Karachi to the Mughal grandeur of Lahore, up through the tribal borderlands where Pashtunwali is still the only law that matters, to the Karakoram mountains where K2 kills one climber in four and the Kalash people are making wine in a country that officially doesn't allow it. Along the way: the army that runs the country from the city next door to the capital, the blasphemy law that nobody in government dares touch, the nuclear arsenal that every intelligence agency in the world has nightmares about, and the Sufi shrines that were bombed on a Thursday and had forty thousand visitors the following Thursday. Pakistan shouldn't work. It keeps working anyway. The story of how - and for how long - is one of the most important stories of the twenty-first century, and almost nobody is telling it honestly. Tudor tells it honestly. Part travel writing, part political history, part love letter to a country that doesn't expect love letters - Pakistan is country 101 in the Travel Nerd Series, and the one that broke the instrument.

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