At 79, Pak official comes up with stories of troubled border

Penguin India has acquired the rights for Jamil Ahmad's "The Wandering Falcon" and it will be published by its imprints Hamish Hamilton and Riverhead early near year.

The book, being compared to "Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, will be published in India, the US and the UK.

"The Wandering Falcon" is a collection of interlinked stories that shows from inside in a remote and impenetrable culture.

One of the stories, "The Sins of the Mother," is about a couple from Baluchistan who risk everything by fleeing from their tribe and it will be published in the upcoming Pakistan issue of the Granta magazine.

"I had a tip-off from a friend in Pakistan that a remarkable book had been written. Jamil Ahmad is an extraordinarily talented writer. The 'Wandering Falcon' is stark, compelling, wise, emotional yet unsentimental all at once," says senior editor of Penguin Meru Gokhale.

"...I was struck by the clarity and power of the writing, and the way it brings to life a place and a world which has remained hitherto largely unrecorded. As only the best fiction can, the book brings us news but, more than that, it brings us stories which lodge in the mind with force and emotion," says Simon Prosser, publisher of Hamish Hamilton.