At the heart of the book are Safdar, Parveen, Siraj, Jannat and Zille, and their lives between 2015 and 2019. An ambulance driver, a crime reporter, a schoolteacher, a village woman, an NGO worker, they live in the poorer, more dangerous parts of the city, Lyari, Orangi, Kiamari, Landhi. Their voices dominate this book, and through them the reader slowly understands this bewildering, compelling and massive city.

... profiles, with great vividness, five individuals who serve as narrative linchpins in a tale of a city hurtling from one crisis to the next.

Shackle excels at drawing out the incisive quote.

... a jigsaw story, pieced together from interviews Ms. Shackle conducted between 2015 and 2019 with five Karachiites who are, in her view, broadly representative of the city’s demographic types.

In extending many of her pieces into a book (previously profiling Safar for Vice and Bahria Town for The Guardian, amongst others), [Shackle] has excluded a few of her finest country pieces, on the strategic port of Gwadar, the revival of Pakistani cinema, and western travel influencers. A gifted writer who has traversed the country from 2012 to 2019, a compilation of her work would seem to be more fitting.

... paints a vivid and compassionate picture of a metropolis struggling with poverty, ethnic tensions, corruption, and the scars of colonialism..

... evocative.

... affecting portraits.