This book was recently long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012 so I thought I'd check it out.
The description of this book made me think that this was going to be like "Catch Me If You Can: The True Story Of A Real Fake". However it really isn't like that.
The story is of Maqil Karam. It follows his life through selected periods of his life. Each chapter is headed after a place in the world, like Paris, London and Lahore, and a year. The story goes from birth to, inevitably, death. Throughout he is changing identities, leaving wives behind, businesses behind..., yet to me, despite the description suggesting that all his past acquaintances were trying to "pin him down", he never seems like he is nearly being found. There was one person, Nasser, that caught up with him but he got out of that rather disappointingly easily, and it never seemed like he was in any danger through the book. Mainly it seems the only people making efforts to keep track of him are family, for reasons that they want to keep in touch rather than pin him down. So I think there could have been more suspense thrown in to make the book more exciting.
Also for me the book didn't really get going until a few chapters in, when he returned to Lahore. But after that false start I got into the book a bit more. The writing style is a contemplative one which has a lot of thought going on throughout.
Overall not the book I was expecting but decent nonetheless.
(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed on Amazon here.)
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