The Collaborator
Viking Pengiun, 2011
Penguin, 2011
2011 Guardian First Book Award finalist
2011 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize finalist
2012 Desmond Elliott Prize longlist
2011 “Books of the Year” in The Telegraph, New Statesman, Business Standard and Telegraph India
By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone.
Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and turned militant to bear arms against the Indian army. He would like to join them – but he cannot.
Instead, put in an impossible position by an Indian army Captain, he must cross into the shadowland between the opposing sides, a ghost walking among the dead. His fate, like that of his lost brothers, unknown…
Buy from:
What They Said
Arundhati Roy
With flashes of brilliance, tenderness and fury, The Collaborator does what fiction should. It makes you listen
The Financial Times
The Collaborator is a tour de force of urgent political observation, filtered through the gaze of a timid adolescent narrator, about a subject unimaginably macabre and surreal. It is a great accomplishment to hold all this in balance with a tender, convincing story of human relationships. Waheed does it brilliantly and the effect is riveting.
Justine Hardy, The Times
Waheed’s writing combines the elegance and gymnastics of another reinterpreter of recent wars and revolutions, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and of Mohammed Hanif, the author of the sublime Pakistani satire A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Books of the Year, Financial Times
A powerful first novel
Deccan Herald
…like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Mirza Waheed’s collaborator too remains nameless. Evocatively written, The Collaborator is a book difficult to put down till one has read through its very last line.
Zamir Ahmed, Kashmir Life
The Collaborator’ is our own story told by one of us and in ways no one else could tell. Like a true classic, The Collaborator is Kaleidoscopic.
Kamila Shamsie, Guardian
Devastating . . . haunting . . . gripping in its narrative drama
Independent on Sunday
Waheed builds an atmosphere of menace and despair . . . his tale possesses a disturbing power that is both lingering and profound
Sanjay Kak, Biblio
Collaborator transcends the banal evil of the Captain to provide us a moving, universal story, and one that pulls off the sensitive task of leading us into the complex narrative of Kashmir. Mirza Waheed’s remarkably confident debut is certainly that seed for the years to come.
Sunday Times
A thrilling, powerful debut
Eunice de Souza, Mumbai Mirror
The Collaborator is that rare thing, a virtually flawless novel.
The Daily Star
The narrator reminds me of Hamlet in the grave digging scene in which the Prince of Denmark talks to the dead jester Yorick. It seems the soliloquy has been expanded to explore its limit with Kashmir at the centre.
Nadeem Aslam
I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet is tinged with melancholy and grief. I was shaking at times, was livid at times and was moved to tears ultimately
Indian Express
…the story effectuates a stirring catharsis, like the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish…
The New Zealand Herald
This is a dazzling debut novel, full of drama, intrigue and beautiful writing.
Daily Mail
Compelling . . . An important and poetic testimony to an all-too-easily forgotten war
India Today
Mirza’s rage has a flaming beauty… Certainly there is an epic quality about The Collaborator
Jacob Silverman, The National
The Collaborator is a searing, disturbing novel…the novel’s virtues are overflowing. Waheed has opened a window into Kashmiri life: the view is both discomfiting and necessary.
Jacob Silverman, The National
The Collaborator is a searing, disturbing novel…the novel’s virtues are overflowing. Waheed has opened a window into Kashmiri life: the view is both discomfiting and necessary.
Select Press
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – review
Kamila Shamsie, The Guardian
Kamila Shamsie is gripped by a debut novel that offers a devastating portrait of Kashmir
A trip down skeleton lane
Eunice de Souza, Mumbai Mirror
The Collaborator is that rare thing, a virtually flawless novel.
The Collaborator, By Mirza Waheed
Peter Carty, The Independent
Taking to the hills with the lost boys of Kashmir
Meanings of The Collaborator
Zamir Ahmed, Kashmir Life
Sometimes fiction tells a truth more comprehensively than elements of truth put together as anything else. Zamir Ahmed writes about The Collaborator, its author and his childhood friend Mirza Waheed and what his debut novel may mean to different readers.
5 recent reads: The Collaborator
Graeme Barrow, The Northern Advocate
This is a dazzling debut novel, full of drama, intrigue and beautiful writing. It is also an insight into the tensions and contradictions of the former princely state of Kashmir.
The ghosts will walk
Sanjay Kak, Biblio
Kashmir will haunt India the way
Algeria haunts France.
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed
A debut novel set in Kashmir in the early 1990s, from a BBC journalist born in the area, examines the issues behind the area’s current problems
One to watch: Mirza Waheed
Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy, The Guardian
The Collaborator, the BBC journalist’s debut novel, has moved men to tears
Trapped in trauma
Deccan Herald
The Collaborator is a book difficult to put down till one has read through its very last line.
Horrors Hiding Behind the Poplars
Shruti Ravindran, The Indian Express
In the isolation and vulnerability of a teenaged Kashmiri,first-time novelist Mirza Waheed brings out the tragedy of the Valley.
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed
Justine Hardy, The Times of London
The Collaborator: A fictional story too close to the reality of Kashmir
Jacob Silverman, The National News
The Collaborator
The Daily Star
Readers of Waheed’s The Collaborator are in for a rude awakening in the valley of death set in Kashmir.
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed: review
Sameer Rahim, The Telegraph
Sameer Rahim reviews The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, a novel about growing up in Kashmir.
Mirza Waheed: The Collaborator
The Modern Novel Blog