Night of the Golden Butterfly

Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, Night of the Golden Butterfly moves between the cities of the twenty- first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honor. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun - known as Plato - an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where "human dignity has become a wreckage." Plato, who once specialized in stepping back into the limelight, now wants his life story written.

As the tale unravels we meet Plato's London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. "Naughty" Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals forces her to flee to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris; and there's Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator's first love. Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie's family. Her great forebear, D W nxi , led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region for almost a decade, as Sultan Suleiman. Night of the Golden Butterfly reveals Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics - including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome - as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.