Ghulam Mohammad, successful hotelier and shop owner, wants to sell up and buy a church – a derelict church in a run-down corner of Birmingham – and convert it into a mosque. But his son has other plans. With an eye on his temporal rather than spiritual riches, he will stop at nothing to protect his inheritance . . .

This collection of seventeen short stories by Pakistani women covers a wide range of subjects, from the stream-of-consciousness that is ‘Millipede’ – recounting a man’s descent into madness as his obsession that he has become infected by insects grows – to the violence shown by a father to his son when he beats him to within an inch of his life in ‘The Coach’. The stories have a diversity that reflects Pakistani women themselves.

First published by the Pakistani Academy of Letters, the narratives from the post-independence generation are translated from Urdu, Punjabi, Seraiki, Pushto and Sindhi. They reveal the increasing power and influence that Pakistani women writers have achieved in the last half-century and explore the contrasts and conflicts between the modern and the traditional worlds.