Thirst All Around

Thirst All Around is the first novel of Hamza Hassan Sheikh, a young writer from Pakistan. Hamza writes splendidly about disaffected, damaged people, alienated from society in some way, often isolated physically and psychologically. The protagonists in his first novel are all like that. Foremost among them is Mohsin, a university student, who falls in love with a classmate, Shiza.It’s a novel which scans university life. We get to hear about the young peoples’ readings, examinations, food they like to eat, and friendships they make. The plot calls little attention to itself. The protagonist intersects with characters he meets at university. The events progress though a series of vignettes that succeeds as individual stories as well as sequences.There’s also the social awareness and immediacy that marks the fiction, especially the desperate times for every one of that age and social background.Thirst All Around, It is far from heartless, but its structure of feeling does remain diffuse and impalpable.