The Book of Gold Leaves
Penguin UK, 2015
Penguin India, 2014
2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature shortlist
2014 Year’s Best Book Hindustan Times
Folio Long List
Tata Lit Prize Finalist
In an ancient house in the city of Srinagar, Faiz paints exquisite papier-mâché pencil boxes for tourists. Evening is beginning to slip into night when he sets off for the shrine. There he finds the woman with the long black hair. Roohi is prostrate before her God. She begs for the boy of her dreams to come and take her away. Roohi wants a love story. An age-old tale of love, war, temptation, duty and choice, The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking tale of a what might have been, what could have been, if only.
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What They Said
News on Sunday
A harrowing tale of love in a time of conflict and change . . . The language in this book is lyrical, indeed at times it seems to be poetry masquerading as prose. The Book of Gold Leaves is the sort of book one can read and re-read – and then read again
Kaveree Bamzai, India Today
Like the gold leaves of the book’s title, Waheed’s prose is like pixie dust, sprinkled all over a city of heartbreak and despair. It is a city that has found in Waheed, the great-grandson of a much-admired papier-mache artist, its truest troubadour. Read him and weep.
Eunice de Souza
Mirza Waheed’s novel is a brush with unflinching melancholy – the desolation of Kashmir seeping into the narrative of an otherwise guiltless love story.
Mahvesh Murad, Dawn
The Collaborator was also a beautiful, emotional and lyrical novel and The Book of Gold Leaves is even more so, almost to the point of being indulgent. This is not criticism — the beautiful, elegant indulgence of prose works because this is not just the love story of Faiz and Roohi, it is the love story of Kashmir and her people, of Srinagar and the writer.
Financial Times, London
A haunting illustration of how, at the end of last century, normal life became impossible for many of those who call Kashmir home . . .Waheed’s talent lies in the vivid, convincing detail he brings to descriptions of everyday lives. The careful meshing of domestic intimacy with political events is done deftly, with integrity. Like his great-grandfather’s gold painting, Waheed’s work will undoubtedly endure.
Kamila Shamsie Guardian, Books of the Year
A beautifully told and finely choreographed story of love, art and conflict in Kashmir.
Hindustan Times, 'Books of the Year'
Poetic and political with a warm sensuousness, The Book of Gold Leaves is the year’s best book. As beautifully written as the paintings on papier mache that one of its central characters executes, this fine examination of the Kashmiri condition through a Sunni-Shia love story leaves the reader both wretched and transformed, and brings us to a greater understanding of the fragility of love in a harsh climate.
Paddy Kehoe, RTE
Mirza Waheed has a similar furtive, sometimes almost reticent narrative approach. He can be gently suggestive with an innate poetic sensibility, despite the necessary thriller elements in his engaging saga.
The Guardian
Waheed writes about war with a devastating and unflinching calm, with the melancholy wisdom of someone attuned to but never hardened by its horrors . . . He has a formidable insight into his large cast of characters, from the elegant grief-stricken principal of the girls’ school taken over by Indian officers to the spoilt boy-turned-insurgent who betrays his own father.
Stylist
A dazzling and heart-breaking story set in war-torn Kashmir – essential reading.
Lucy Scholes, The National
Much of Waheed’s writing is incredibly beautiful…Waheed’s tender portrait of his star-crossed lovers sits in stark contrast to his depiction of a city and its inhabitants beset by terror; and against this simmering background, Roohi and Faiz’s against-all-odds love story shines out brightly as a beacon of hope.
India Today, 'Books of the Year'
Waheed writes about Kashmir with compassion, not anger . . . [and] one finds a strange and terrible beauty. There are no heroes or villains in this exquisite book, just a palpable grief for what might have been.
Sunday Telegraph
Waheed’s new novel returns to 1990s Kashmir. If The Collaborator was journalistic in its zeal to explain Kashmir . . . [here] what keeps you reading is the story. He relies on family dynamics to drive the action . . . it’s ultimately how the novel accounts for the moral toll of war.
Select Press
The Book of Gold Leaves review – Mirza Waheed speaks up for Kashmir
Chitra Ramaswamy, The Guardian
The South Asian conflict has found its storyteller in this tense novel of love and war
Second Kashmir novel looks at land torn apart by war
Kit Gillet, South China Morning Post
Mirza Waheed’s second Kashmir-set novel evokes sadness for a beautiful land torn apart by war
“The Book of Gold Leaves” – and love and loss
Najeeb Mubarki, The Economic Times
Book Review: The Book of Gold Leaves
Gargi Gupta, DNA India
Ancient Greek drama had something called deus ex machina — a mechanical device that would appear suddenly at the end of a play, the manifestation of some divine force, and set everything magically right. The Zaal in The Book of Gold Leaves works in a somewhat similar fashion, except that it’s not an agent of god but of evil, a diabolus ex machina whose appearance is the foreboder of tragedy.
Love in the time of curfew
Umber Khairi, The News
Mirza Waheed’s new book is a harrowing tale of love in a time of conflict and change
The Book Of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed
Preeti Singh, The Good Book Corner
Mirza’s grandfather’s Book of Gold helped create the link between the past and the present, and now graces the cover of Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves.
A definite read.
Book Review: The Book Of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed
Mary Ann Pickford, The Northern Echo and The Irish Examiner
In his second novel, journalist Mirza Waheed deftly transports our imaginations to his enchanting homeland Kashmir.
Book Review: 'The Book of Gold Leaves’, by Mirza Waheed
Alice Albinia, The Financial Times
The South Asian conflict has found its storyteller in this tense novel of love and war
Mirza Waheed's novel recounts the dehumanisation of Srinagar against the backdrop of a magical love story
Kaveree Bamzai, India Today
Mirza Waheed’s novel recounts the dehumanisation of Srinagar against the backdrop of a magical love story.
COVER STORY: The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed
Mahvesh Murad, The Dawn
SRINAGAR, Kashmir, in the early 1990s. A young man paints dozens of delicate naqashi papier-mache pencil boxes that he sells for export. He wants very much to spend his time painting the large canvas that he believes will be his finest work, but he knows that the once-wealthy Mir family need the money he brings in.
The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed
Paddy Kehoe, RTE
Waheed paints the city vividly and ratchets up the tension as Srinagar endures a kind of siege.
Golden leaves, autumn leaves
Eunice de Souza, Mumbai Mirror
Golden leaves, autumn leaves
Eunice de Souza, Mumbai Mirror
The Book of Gold Leaves…A Love Story set in conflict
Shah Khalid, Kashmir Images
Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves: Redrawing the Maps of Reality
Jaalib Ahmed Bhat, Ground Xero
The Book of Gold Leaves is both a gripping history as well as a passionate tale of the human predicament from a place marked by a prolonged violent conflict. It is a novel which unearths love, relationships, suppressed dreams and desires being lost to violence and war. Through its reimagining of the 1990s Kashmir, the novel provides both direct and indirect account of the oppression and violence, the immeasurable pain of dislocation, and the agony and human loss arising out of a situation in which society is fragmented, and home and homeland are lost, writes Jaalib Ahmed Bhat.
A Miniaturist’s Offerings
Mahesh Rao, Open Magazine
Mirza Waheed’s second novel, in the finest romantic tradition, depicts love amidst conflict in Kashmir
Mirza Waheed’s second novel sees star-cross’d lovers in the heart of Kashmir
Lucy Scholes, The National
Mirza Waheed’s lyrical novel describes a love across sectarian lines in the tinderbox that was Kashmir in 1991.
The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed, review: 'a compelling story'
Anthony Cummins, The Telegraph
Anthony Cummins admires a novel with a near-satirical take on Kashmiri politics
Review: ‘The Book of Gold Leaves’, by Mirza Waheed
Zafar Anjum, Kitaab
Old, peaceable ways of life unravel in a ‘strange, compelling’ novel set amid the violence of 1990s Kashmir: Alice Albinia in the FT
Review: The Book of Gold Leaves
Diane de Beer, Independent Online
This is the story of Faiz, a quiet and gentle young man who supports his large Sunni family in Srinagar by painting countless pencil boxes every day.
Short review essay on Mirza Waheed's 'The Book of Gold leaves'
Sakoon Singh, E3W Review of Books
Review: The Book of Gold Leaves Is A ‘Melancholy’ Story
Kashoo Tawseef, Countercurrents