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Islam Quintet 5: Night of the Golden Butterfly

By: Ali, Tariq
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Language: English

Softcover

Part of the The Islam Quintet series

The final volume in Tariq Ali’s acclaimed cycle of historical novels, The Islam Quintet

Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, over twenty years in the writing, which has been translated into a dozen languages.

Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the concluding novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun—known as Plato—an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where “human dignity has become a wreckage.” Plato, who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight, now wants his life story written.

As the tale unravels we meet Plato’s London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. “Naughty” Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals forces her to flee to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she becomes an overnight celebrity, hailed as the Diderot of the Islamic world; and there’s Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator’s first love. The daughter of a Chinese family long settled in Lahore, Jindie is now married to his best friend, a Republican heart surgeon in DC, whose children cannot forgive him for saving the life of a much-despised politician.

Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie’s family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade as Sultan Suleiman.

Night of the Golden Butterfly shows Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.

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Product Details
By:Ali, Tariq
Language:English
Format:Softcover
Pages: 275 pp
Publisher:Verso, London/NY, 2015
Dimensions:13.5 x 20 cm / 5.25 x 7.75 inches
ISBN-13:9781781680063
Topic:Historical Novel - International Cities

More Information

Tariq Ali (b. 1943, England)
«Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist.»
— Observer

Tariq Ali has written more than two-dozen books on world history and politics—the most recent of which are The Clash of Fundamentalisms, The Obama Syndrome and The Extreme Centre—as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a long-standing member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.

Islam Quintet 5: Night of the Golden Butterfly
US$16.95

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