'Some of the more heart-shaking writing about love and grief I've ever read' Kamila Shamsie, from the introductionMeatless Days is a searing memoir of life in the newly-created country of Pakistan. When sudden and shocking tragedies hit the author's family two years apart, her personal crisis spirals into a wider meditation on universal questions: about being a woman when you're too busy being a mother or a sister or a wife to consider your own womanhood; about how it feels to begin life in a new language; about how our lives are changed by the people that leave them. This is a heart-breaking, hopeful and profound book that will get under your skin.'Extraordinary... as an evocation of family love, with all its sharpness, pain and need, Meatless Days is almost faultless' New Statesman