Curfewed Night: A Memoir of War in Kashmir

Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and Winner of the Crossword Prize for Non-fiction`"Curfewed Night" is a passionate and important book - a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman RushdieBasharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the `Line of Control' to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir - angrier, more violent, more hopeless - was never far away.In 2003 Peer, now a young journalist, left his job and returned to his homeland. Drawing a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and her people - a mother forced to watch her son hold an exploding bomb, politicians living in refurbished torture chambers, picturesque villages riddled with landmines - this is above all, a story of what it really means to return home - and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.Lyrical, spare, gut-wrenching and intimate, Curfewed Night is a powerful and intensely moving debut, combining the insight of a journalist with the prose of a poet.