THE volumes of Pakistani English fiction I’ve accumulated and carted between continents over the last 12 months — whether furtively purchased from Amazon’s global domains, plucked with haste from fast-disappearing piles at the annual Karachi Literature Festival (KLF), or pondered over as light fell on a late afternoon at Lahore’s literary treasure-trove, Readings — now crowd my London bed, begging to be assembled into some kind of order.

There are those novels which attempt to coax some sense or meaning out of the operations of the chaotic, corrupt, violent and violating city, specifically Karachi. These include Omar Shahid Hamid’s debut crime-thriller, The Prisoner (2013) and Bilal Tanweer’s now DSC-shortlisted The Scatter Here is Too Great (2013), set amidst what Tanweer describes as the “ferocious noise” of the maritime metropolis’s densely peopled streets and traffic-laden intersections.

Working both the city’s networks of informers, convicts and corrupt officers, and his personal connections to its bureaucratic, political and intelligence officials, the veteran detective protago-nist Constantine in Hamid’s contemporary fiction of intrigue struggles more straightforwardly to obtain sufficient information to solve the mystery of what happened to a foreign journalist kid-napped in an apparent act of terror. Meanwhile, in Tanweer’s more intricate and elliptical The Scatter Here is Too Great, the youthful narrator, distracted by images of destruction and death, attempts to gather together stories of those affected by Karachi’s Cantt Station bomb-blast, which will help us collectively “compose ourselves” as something “greater than fragments.” Tanweer’s readership is of course already captive. But, when it comes to the conversion of “noise” into narrative, of meaningless parts into “mad” wholes, one is left to wonder how many of the inhabitants of the pre-apocalyptic city he paints, haunted by hag-like harbingers in the guise of Gog and Magog, and thriving on a willful deafness to others’ distress, can afford to listen to the storyteller’s tales.

Other works which look back to earlier periods of Pakistan’s history, prompted perhaps by recent national political events, and in line with significant moments of international celebration and memorialisation, have also found their way onto my shelves. For example, Bina Shah’s A Season for Martyrs, recently reviewed in these pages, uses the 2008 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto as the framing narrative for an exploration of past expressions of anti-colonial dissent originating from Sindh. Through a series of vignettes, this novel registers in par-ticular an enduring desire among the sons and daughters of that region to protect and preserve its precious Sufistic “spiritual energy” and resistant poetic culture at a time in which the shrines and “signs” of “holy men and oracles, Pirs and sheikhs” have increasingly been targeted by extremists, while such mystics’ defiant verses have been redeployed to “sing” of people’s desire to live in a land of democracy and freedom.

Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone (2014) hones more precisely in on a specific and treacherous period of British colonial history in which “native” expressions of loyalty and antipathy were also being articulated. Shamsie’s epic novel spans the years from the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914 (a cause to which, as centenary publications and commemorative pro-grammes broadcast in Britain over the past year have sought to underscore, around 1.5 million Indian volunteer troops were recruited) to the massacre of hundreds of peaceful, pro-independence protesters in April 1930 at Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar at the hands of panicking imperial administrators.

So doing, the novel traces its Pakhtun protagonist’s transforming emotional and political allegiances as, increasingly uncomfortable with his ‘heroic’ role as a uniformed, Europe-returned Brit-ish Army invalid, his head is turned by the imposing leader of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement. For the confused and wounded Qayyum, the charismatic Ghaffar Khan’s reforming ethos of Pakhtun “advancement” by a means “untainted” either “by the superstition of the mullahs and the brainwashing of the English,” or by the tribesman’s lethal “sword,” seems suddenly attractive; for an epiphanic moment it replaces “all the noise of the world” which has been crowding in on him with “unexpected music.”

Shamsie’s novel poignantly touches on a historic vision of Pakhtun self-determination which, Qayyum understands, could not remain unstained, whatever its founder’s intentions, because the English authorities who attempted to police it “wouldn’t believe” that members of a “race” they had classified as “Martial … weren’t intent on violence.”

Other novels which have particularly arrested my attention, set in more contemporary contexts, and touching on the uncomfortable relationship of Pakistan’s peripheries to its centre, specifi-cally its Tribal Areas and the lands bordering Afghanistan, include Fatima Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013) and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin (2012), which was awarded the French Embassy Prize for Best Fiction at the KLF in 2014. Bhutto’s North Waziristan-set novel, not unlike Tanweer’s debut, traces the events of a single Friday in a series of narrative fragments told from the divergent perspectives of three brothers living in the insurgency-scarred border town of Mir Ali.

Seen through the dispassionate eyes of the dreamer-turned-informer, Aman Erum, this is an area conceived of by “most Pakistanis … with the same hostility they reserved for India or Bang-ladesh,” inhabited by “insiders — traitors — who fought their way out of the body and somehow made it on their own without the glory of the crescent moon and star shining overhead.” Never-theless, it is also a place over which, ironically, “the shadow of that moon never faded”; one that — given its transgression of state dominance, and the refusal of “men in khaki from the central province … to let it go” — remains perpetually “condemned.”

This condemnation of certain liminal spaces and peoples is a theme common to Khan’s fourth novel, which unfolds mostly in the valley of Kaghan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Here the nomadic Gujjar community’s quiet lives and homes are routinely disrupted, and at times devastated, by the intrusions of numerous “authorities” — “policemen,” “plainclothesmen,” men in uniforms, men in turbans, or tourists who will, in different ways, exploit their vulnerability as unsettled peoples and potential shelterers of insurgents. Whether seeking information, compensation, or sustenance, the appetites of these outsider figures, for “ghee and sugar, mutton and bread,” the names of militants, or the bodies of young boys, are rarely satisfied.

While Khan interweaves legends and myths into her novel which help to describe her Gujjar protagonists’ intimate and convivial relation to their at times harsh natural landscape, the plagues visited upon their huts by “the forest inspector and tax collector … the policemen, soldiers and spies,” including the disappearance of the two local boys with men who wore expensive “red pom-poms” on the straps of their “beige and brown leather” slippers, read like fairy-tales, or nightmares, but are neither sublimated or assimilated. For Khan, too, offers her readers a fractured narrative, where they must work to piece together the relationship between violent events occurring in Pakistan’s metropolitan centres, such as a bomb-blast involving an American victim at a Karachi hotel, and the violation and suspension of the rights of those subaltern peoples located at the country’s extreme peripheries.

Rightly or wrongly, throughout my reflection on these contemporary Pakistani novels, the lines of W. B. Yeats have continued to resurface in my mind: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” And yet such novels seem to testify that the centre continues to tighten its grip, to refuse to loosen hold, with particularly devastating consequences for generations of citizens born on its margins.

What remains? The short-story collections and novellas, in English and English translation, I have saved till last in the hope of savouring their more wide-ranging diasporic, South Asian and historical perspectives: Aamer Hussein’s The Swan’s Wife (2014), Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Gatekeeper’s Wife (2014), Intizar Husain’s The Death of Sheherzad (2014), translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, and The Madness of Waiting by Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, translated by Krupa Shandilya and Taimoor Shahid (2014). If scattered stories, as Tanweer suggests, are a means “to find ways into the world” — and of understanding how we attempt to “compose ourselves in ways that others [can] read” — then perhaps next year it is in fact these tales in distilled, concentrated, concise form, that I should attempt to gather together first.