The Collaborator

‘Compelling … An important and poetic testimony to an all-too-easily forgotten war’

Daily Mail

By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone.

Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and turned militant to bear arms against the Indian army. He would like to join them - but he cannot.

Instead, put in an impossible position by an Indian army Captain, he must cross into the shadowland between the opposing sides, a ghost walking among the dead. His fate, like that of his lost brothers, unknown …

‘Waheed’s prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris’

Metro

‘Possesses a disturbing power that is both lingering and profound’

Independent on Sunday

‘A thrilling, powerful debut’

Sunday Times

‘A beautifully realized account of horror, grief and the psychological trauma of war’

Observer