The Scatter Here is Too Great - Softcover

"A beautiful debut. A blood-soaked love letter to Karachi." (Mohammed Hanif)

"Timely and unconventional... Its beautiful fragments coalesce to form an elaborate, haunting portrait of urban Pakistan, one that is rich with acute sociological detail and subtle existential contemplation." (Hirsh Sawhney Guardian)

"A superb and genuinely exciting debut. By the end of this book Tanweer had made me see that certain things are more beautiful and valuable for having been broken." (Nadeem Aslam)

"Bilal Tanweer uses his many gifts as a writer to evoke a Karachi of humour, violence, frustration, love - and breathtaking stories at every turn. A wonderful debut." (Kamila Shamsie)

"Bilal Tanweer has written a modern love letter - furious, passionate, playful, and longing - to Pakistan. And in his brilliant hands he tells the universal story of home." (Ben Marcus)

Shortlisted for the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2014

The Scatter Here Is Too Great heralds a major new voice from Pakistan with a stunning debut - a novel told in a rich variety of distinctive voices that converge at a single horrific event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city.

Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father, struggles to find words.

In a style that is at once inventive and deeply moving, Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal individuals and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too great is a love story written to Karachi - as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.