What Kept You? Fiction

As a child in Pakistan, Jahan was raised on her grandmother's stories, influenced by the demons of folklore, and the memory of violence and forced displacement caused by the British partition of India tales that taught her to be wary of the world. But her grandmother's life, filled with quiet defiance, hints at another truth. Jahan rebels against the constraints she lives under as a young woman growing up in Lahore, and migrates to Australia, where she meets her husband, whose family is from the Middle Ease. As she reckons with the unruliness of her body after a miscarriage, and the bushfires which threaten their home and horses on the rural outskirts of Sydney, she is forced to confront the violence that haunts her, against women, animals, and in nature. A feminist anti-tale, written in a uniquely expressive voice that floats between English, Urdu and Arabic, What kept you? explores survival, metamorphosis, and the radical freedom of choosing one's own ending.