Earlier this week, BBC unveiled the list of ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’ and three Pakistani authors, Kamila Shamsie, Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid have made it to the list.
Shamsie’s Home Fire is in the ‘Politics, Power & Protest’ category while Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist falls in the ‘Crime & Conflict’ category. Moreover Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man also features in the same category as Hamid’s.
According to BBC’s website, a panel of leading writers, curators and critics chose 100 genre-busting novels that have had an impact on their lives. “These English language novels, written over the last 300 years, range from children’s classics to popular page turners. Organised into themes, they reflect the ways books help shape and influence our thinking,” noted BBC.
Modern works such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and His Dark Materials made the cut along with classics like Jane Austin’s Pride & Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Some of the other novels chosen include A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin – the first book of the series that inspired the smash hit TV show – Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia along with Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns are also included in the list.
