In Conversation: On Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City

Cal Flyn is the author of Thicker Than Water (Harper Collins) and Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (Viking), which has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, the British Academy Book Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize. Her journalistic writing has been published in Granta, The Sunday Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, The Economist, and others. She is a columnist for Prospect, deputy editor of literary recommendations site Five Books, and a regular contributor to The Guardian.

Samira Shackle, editor of New Humanist magazine and a regular contributor to The Guardian, frequently reports from Pakistan, where she has family. Armed with her personal experience and the help of several knowledgeable and brave Karachiites, Shackle pulls the veil from Pakistan’s largest city, a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people that is twice the size of New York City. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, in Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City (Melville House), she paints a vivid portrait of one of the most complex and compelling cities in the world, where the distinctions between politicians and gangsters and lawful and unlawful blur – and where dangerous new forces of violent extremism are pitted against old networks of power. Publishers Weekly praised it as an "evocative portrait ... Vivid prose and Shackle’s skillful balancing of the personal and the political make this a worthy introduction to a complex metropolis.”