Few authors will confess to deciding the direction of their literary careers on the toss of a coin. But Pakistani-born British novelist Nadeem Aslam likes to tell people he did exactly that.
It happened that way, says Aslam, because after completing his award-winning debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), he had two novels inside him bursting to leap out. One was his recent, much-acclaimed The Wasted Vigil. The other was Maps for Lost Lovers, which was hailed as a masterpiece and explores the tensions within a working-class Pakistani community in a northern English town in the wake of a double 'honour killing'.
'The Afghanistan story was important to me because I wouldn't be in the west if it weren't for Afghanistan. I was living in the west in an immigrant neighbourhood and things were happening within that community - the Muslims were finding it difficult to fit into the host society - and that to me seemed like an urgent matter as well,' he says. 'So I tossed a coin and began writing my immigrant novel, which 11 years later became Maps for Lost Lovers.'
Lauded for its prescience and the lyrical way it distils beauty and sadness on the page, Maps won the 2005 Kiriyama Prize for fiction, the British Society of Authors 2005 Encore prize, was short-listed for the 2006 IMPAC award and made the 2004 Booker Prize's long list, en route to becoming a New York Times notable book.
During the 11 years he spent writing it, Aslam, 42, says: 'I kept a notebook on the Afghanistan situation. So once I finished Maps for Lost Lovers, I immediately sat down and began writing The Wasted Vigil. After the Soviets left Afghanistan the west withdrew its gaze. But terrible things were happening there and I was cataloguing them as I went along, thinking they should all go into my novel.'
The Wasted Vigil is much more than a catalogue of horrors. It is a rare novel that speaks to the human soul as potently as it does to the global moment. A novel of such extraordinary visual beauty that it brings to mind Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, its reach extends far beyond its borders: it tells of a group of disparate people who seek shelter in the half-ruined home of Marcus, an elderly British doctor and perfumer, who has lost his wife, his daughter and his hand to the violence engulfing the country.