In the mid-nineties, Birjees Dawar Ali returns to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished long ago; one from which, nursing heartbreak and betrayal, she had previously fled home to partitioned India. Will she find the family that so generously gave her succor, the home that became her own, and the unquestioning love she found there? Or will these certainties have crumbled with the march of history?

A deeply moving narrative of love and loss, All Passion Spent is set in the continuing aftermath of the 1947 partition of India and the subsequent emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries. Zaheda Hina’s richly layered narrative, brought alive in this lyrical and poetic translation by Neelam Hussain, touches on the many complexities that surround this painful history: a profound sense of grief and displacement in the subcontinent, the lives sundered midstream, lost friendships, and the quest for new roots and lands.

Zaheda Hina is a well-known Urdu journalist and writer, whose strong interest in history informs much of her work. She was nominated for Pakistan’s highest literary award, the Pride of Performance award, in 2006, which she declined as a mark of protest against the military government of Pakistan. Neelam Hussain is a writer and translator. She works with Simorgh Women’s Resource and Publication Centre and teaches English at Lahore Grammar School in Pakistan.