Mirza Waheed speaks up for Kashmir in his new novel

The Guardian reviews The Book of Gold Leaves 

All love stories set in wartime must negotiate hazardous terrain. Why should we care about a couple of thwarted sweethearts in the midst of so much death and despair? Great love-in-war novels must nurture both themes simultaneously. And the love must be the kind that can only be born out of war: forbidden, desperate and usually doomed.

Mirza Waheed’s second novel, following The Collaborator, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, begins as a classic, written-in‑the-stars love story set during the 90s in Kashmir. Faiz is an earnest young man who supports his large Sunni family in Srinagar, where Waheed himself grew up, by painting hundreds of pencil boxes a month. These are shipped out to Canada in a world where art travels but people cannot. Faiz is the proverbial dreamer, a frustrated artist trained in naqashi (the ancient art of papier-mache) who secretly toils away at a vast canvas that, like the war, will remain unfinished.