In a city by the sea

The past year has not been kind to Pakistan. The pandemic has crippled the country, leaving limited capacity to battle another contagion: bad PR. 2019 saw the launch of Sanam Maher’s A Woman Like Her and in 2020 we read Declan Walsh’s The Nine Lives of Pakistan. British freelance writer Samira Shackle’s newly released Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City completes a carnage trilogy, revealing the “sectarian and ethnic resentment mingling with politics and organized crime,” as she writes on the city of 20 million.