I’ve never been to Pakistan. But am keen to go as there is terrific hiking in the Himalaya.

I read this excellent book as research.

Sadly, in terms of progress, India has done far better since Partition .

The invasion in 1979 by the Soviet Union was a huge setback, of course.

Declan Walsh is an Irish author and journalist who is the Chief Africa Correspondent for The New York Times. 

Walsh was expelled from Pakistan in May 2013—an experience he wrote about in his 2020 book The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State—but continued covering the country from London.

In fact, Walsh was ejected just prior to the 2013 Pakistani general election when Nawaz Sharif was just barely elected.

The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists.

Walsh is a wonderful writer, with a gift for sketching an impression of a place, time and ambience with a few brief lines. …

What also shines through is the relish with which Walsh throws himself into the far corners of Pakistan, into crowds, celebrations and rites, with a drive born of fascination with the land and its people. …

Guardian Review

“Above all, Pakistanis are survivors. Yet a country, like a person, may only have nine lives. Rather than fate to overtake them, some of the people I met in the Insha’Allah nation took matters into their own hands…”

Book Review: The Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh