Walsh spent nearly a decade living in and covering Pakistan, first for The Guardian, then for The Times. He meets a crusading lawyer who risks her life to fight for society's most marginalised, taking on everyone including the powerful military establishment; an imperious chieftain spouting poetry at his desert fort; a roguish politician waging a mini-war against the Taliban; and a charismatic business tycoon who moves into politics and seems to be riding high - till he takes up the wrong cause.

Painting a vivid portrait of a country that has long been in flux, Walsh provides us with a narrative that is rich with nuanced storytelling as well as in-depth information about contemporary Pakistan and its complex social and political situation.His tenure coincided with some of the country’s most turbulent modern years: fraught elections, assassinations and military rule; a war next door and within; and a tenuous alliance with the United States fraying to the breaking point, particularly after American Special Forces found Osama bin Laden hiding inside Pakistan, and killed him. He wrote fearlessly about the country’s troubled nationalism, the instrumentalization of blasphemy, and the schisms that cut across society, in stories and essays that, with some tweaks, could have been written today.

With the worlds fifth largest population and a worldwide diaspora, it is remarkable how little understood Pakistan is. It would be a great book for students and teachers who have a particular developed interest in Pakistan as well as those interested in non-fiction and biographies. Forward movement on any front requires initiative from its key Members, developed and developing alike, to find common ground and make the hard decisions needed to bridge gaps.He knows how to interweave travelogue with an account of the relentless tensions that always threaten to burst through each vignette in the book. The terrifying wave of Islamist militancy — suicide bombings and many thousands of deaths — that threatened to rip Pakistan apart for about a decade following the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad in 2007 has thankfully receded. After Partition in 1947, Walsh explains, imams lost their sway in society, sinking to a status somewhere between a teacher and a tailor in the villages. The foreign minister of Laos, this year’s ASEAN chair, expressed cautious optimism about the potential for progress in 2024.