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This book took me a very long time to read. Partly I was taking it slowly to enjoy the writing, but partly I have to say that it was just too darned complicated. There are too many storylines from too many time periods and they don't entirely knit together.

I read a lot about Pakistan, Bangladesh and India and I did find new perspectives in this book. It was a novel approach to take a child from his home and his mother to be brought up in another place with another family, and then used by his bio-father many years later to cover up a crime. I'll give a good score for the novelty value.

We get to meet a lot of characters at a lot of times. We are in North Africa with a captured Indian officer fighting with the British and his friend who later becomes a big hotshot politician. We are in the red light district of Lahore at multiple different periods in time. We are in Bengal during the Bangladeshi independence war and then in India in a POW camp after that war. We bounce between the eponymous here, Faraz Ali, and his estranged sister the fading filmstar beauty, her daughter, her mother, her various lovers, and then Faraz's bio-father, that man's friends and a cast of red light hangers on. It really is all over the place.

The timings are interesting. There is far more time given to the role of soldiers from the sub-continent in WW2 than there is for the 1947 Partition of India. Since every writer that spans that time always includes Partition, its absence was notable. I've read a lot - in as much as there aren't that many - of books set during the later split of East and West Pakistan into Bangladesh and the smaller Pakistan - but this one is very light on the horrors of that conflict compared to most.

This book contains so much potential but gets a bit lost. I'm not entirely sure I really knew who killed the young prostitute as the 'reveal' at the end was rather light considering how long we took over getting there. And much was hinted at the rise of General Bhutto, but never really fleshed out. Corruption abounds but concrete revelations are hard to find.

I'll read this author again but I would recommend they get an editor who is willing to be a bit more forceful in keeping the focus of the story in the right places.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy.