Born in Heera Mandi, Lahore's famous red-light district, Rania is a tour guide by day and a classical singer by night. Despite the worst of humanity every day - her madrassa-running father selling her mother's body and beating her sister - Rania remains the 'troublemaker', unable to give up on her dreams.
When an Indian filmmaker encourages her to enrol in a music contest that can take her to New York, her dreams take flight. But even as she wins the hearts of her listeners, a family secret threatens to bring her life in Heera Mandi back in sharp relief, upending the new life she has built for herself.
From the oppressive walls of religious hypocrisy to the orange jumpsuits of American prisons, Skyfall is a tender, piercing debut that teaches us the strength of human endeavour and our desire for love in a time of hate.
Autorentext
Saba Karim Khan holds a postgraduate [M.Phil] degree from Oxford University and currently teaches at New York University's international campus in Abu Dhabi. She has taught two creative writing courses and led four creative writing workshops for undergraduate MFA students. Her work has been published in The Huffington Post, DAWN, Express Tribune and ThinkProgress, Washington. She has also been commissioned to write the memoirs of a classical music artist in Pakistan, whose repertoire focuses on ghazals by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mirza Ghalib.