Duty Free
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Jane Austen's Emma, transported to the outrageous social melee of 21st-century Lahore.
Our plucky heroine's cousin, Jonkers, has been dumped by his low-class, slutty secretary, and our heroine has been charged with finding him a suitable wife -- a rich, fair, beautiful, old-family type. Quickly. But, between you, me and the four walls, who wants to marry poor, plain, hapless Jonkers?
As our heroine social-climbs her way through weddings-sheddings, GTs (get togethers, of course) and ladies' lunches trying to find a suitable girl from the right bagground, she discovers to her dismay that her cousin has his own ideas about his perfect mate. And secretly, she may even agree.
Full of wit and wickedness and as clever as its heroine is clueless, Duty Free is a delightful romp through Pakistani high society -- though, even as it makes you cry with laughter, it makes you wince at the gulf between our heroine's glitteringly shallow life and the country that is falling apart, day by day, around her Louboutin-clad feet. Moni Mohsin, already a huge bestseller in India, has been hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen, and compared to Nancy Mitford and Helen Fielding. Duty Free is social satire at its biting best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lady of the house is a social-climbing shopaholic, yapping yenta, and mistress of malapropism, but her hilarious and unsettling story unfolds not in Manhattan but in Lahore, Pakistan a land of Taliban "beardo-weirdos," shifting social mores, and a growing middle class. Mohsin's first novel to be published in America offers biting social satire a news ticker runs atop each page with increasingly bloody and startling news-of-the-day and a tale of redemption, gently skewering her vacuous heroine as she transforms from elitist snob to social maverick. The evolution unfolds as the Social Butterfly is commissioned by her manipulative aunt to play matchmaker for shy, divorced cousin Jonkers. But with just two months to get him hitched to a woman with a fab "bagground," she invariably comes up with all the wrong choices: lesbian Tanya, and Tasbeeh, divorced daughter of a drug-smuggler. In the end, though, Jonkers just may find love all by himself. Mohsin writes firecracker prose and crafts a blazing voice for her Prada-mad heroine, a snappy vixen-type readers will recognize instantly, even if she's never got a cosmo in her hand.