Heroine killin' it in Karachi

The blurb on the back of Saba Imtiaz's debut novel Karachi, You're Killing Me! compares the book to the single girl's Bible, Bridget Jones's Diary.

I take issue with this.

Bridget Jones would never be able to deal with half of the situations that Imtiaz's heroine, Ayesha, successfully navigates. Sure Ayesha drinks too much, makes some atrociously bad decisions about men and complains relentlessly about her job just as Bridget did.

But Ayesha, a journalist in her 20s working in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi, has a toughness and professionalism that Bridget could never achieve.

Karachi, You're Killing Me! traces Ayesha's attempts to pursue her journalistic career and find love in Karachi, a massive metropolis on the country's southern coast. It is a city she either loves intensely or desperately wants to leave. And it's not hard to see why. Her assignments include covering shootouts, the aftermath of bombings and riding rickshaws through the countryside while being pursued by bandits.

What Imtiaz is able to do with her novel is capture the absurdity of reporting and living in a city often billed as Pakistan's most dangerous. Her heroine flits easily from interviewing gangsters in the gang-ridden neighborhood of Lyari to party-hopping through the city's elite Clifton neighborhood, draining hosts of their bootlegged liquor.

In fact, readers who think of Pakistan as a dry country may be surprised to discover that much like an American high school, the complexities of getting liquor and drinking it feature heavily in the novel.