Wandered the Traveller

by Nisar Aziz Butt

English 384 pages 1 edition

‘A book to be treasured’ – Banu Mushtaq ‘Keenly observed and unflinching’ – Annie Zaidi ‘[A] masterpiece’ – Musharraf Ali Farooqi First published in 1955, Wandered the Traveller is a lost classic of South Asian literature – now available in English for the first time in Daisy Rockwell’s revelatory translation. Nisar Aziz Butt’s semi-autobiographical novel follows Afgar, a brilliant young Pashtun woman, from a turbulent orphaned childhood, through the cloistered world of a mountain sanatorium, to the brink of departure in pursuit of a doctorate at Cambridge. Fiercely intelligent yet yearning for love, Afgar measures each man she meets against the standards of her own restless mind, and finds them wanting. Witty, tender, devastating, Wandered the Traveller offers a quietly radical portrait of female ambition and desire from a part of the world nearly absent from the literary canon.