Ice Candy Man

"This is one of my favorite books by a Pakistani writer. What really spoke to me in this novel was the fact that an eight-year-old was telling the story. I found it very refreshing, the way this was written, because a lot of times what happens is even when a child is speaking, it sounds like an adult. Bapsi Sidhwa is such a fantastic, phenomenal writer that it’s a disservice to even discuss her work critically, but I really like the way the voice was. At the time, I was writing my second novel, and I was also telling the story from a seven- to eight-year-old girl’s perspective. Yes, I picked four books that are very recent—published in the past two years—but this was one of my favorite Pakistani novels. There’s another older book I was thinking of choosing, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), by Mohammed Hanif , loosely based on real events, which I would include in this list if it were to be a longer one. I love that book. We read those authors, too. For English literature, we read Dickens and Shakespeare . We were colonized, right? We read The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar . There’s also Urdu literature that we read. We read very difficult poetry by Allama Iqbal, his famous “Shikwa” and “Jawab-e-Shikwa”, which are supposed to be very intense. There would be no novels as such—we focus on short stories and short poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Iqbal. They’re the pre-Partition poets who are the giants of Urdu literature. This year my daughter is in Grade Nine and she’s reading To Kill a Mockingbird . I was very happy with that choice, actually, because I remember reading very old classics. This is also a classic, of course, but it’s a little bit more relevant in terms of our politics. My son is reading Wonder by R. J. Palacio . It’s about a special child and it was turned into a movie with Julia Roberts. It’s a great book. It’s great that children are also reading things that I’ve read later on and really enjoyed."