An intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent -- from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. The tale begins with Anjum -- who used to be Aftab -- unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd Tilo and the men who loved her -- including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart,...

They rarely speak to each other, but they do take notice--watching from the safety of the park's rented cabins, peering into the half-lit drizzle of a Scottish summer day, forming judgments based on what little they know of their temporary neighbors. It is the longest day of the year, and as the hours pass nearly imperceptibly, twelve people shift from being strangers, to bystanders, to allies--their idle curiosity sparked into action as each as inhabitant...

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....

Daevabad has fallen. After a brutal conquest stripped the city of its magic, Nahid leader Banu Manizheh and her resurrected commander, Dara, must try to repair their fraying alliance and stabilize a fractious, warring people. But the bloodletting and loss of his beloved Nahri have unleashed the worst demons of Dara's dark past. To vanquish them, he must face some ugly truths about his history and put himself at the mercy of those he once considered...

An unabridged republication of nineteenth-century essayist Henry David Thoreau's reflections on the natural world, written during a two year period when he lived alone in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond.