Kingdom's End: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reading these stories has helped me understand myself and my world a lot better. There is a lot of praise deserved here for a number of things – Khalid Hasan’s translations, that at times convey to the reader a whiff of the aromatic cadences of Urdu – the edition’s cover, a painting by Iqbal Hussain, in which there is a young lady in blue whose eyes by themselves speak many unspoken narratives – and above all, perhaps drunken, but in perfect command of his by turn sharp, sardonic, and impossibly tender pen, our writer, the inimitable Manto. Among the stories, I would probably mark out ‘On the Balcony’ as my favourite.



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