About Book

A tour de force, Second Coming, first novel by the author explores the sacred and the profane in the life of the protagonist. The multi-layered narrative is seen through his eyes which both colour it, and expose him. It cuts across several countries and cultures, belief systems and social structures, ages and genders. The novel deftly weaves literary and religious allusions and illusions into an absorbing, complex portrayal. A cosmopolitan childhood, challenging and successful middle age and the onset of infirmities of ageing contribute to the unusual manipulation of the time frame. The past, present and future, of a sensitive individual prone to doubt and hope, vulnerability and sureness, are laid candidly bare. It is a story studded with comic moments of self-delusion, folly and the ridiculous. Here, viewed from telling, faceted perspectives, is the human condition.

About Author

M. Athar Tahir is a Lahore-based English language poet and a retired civil servant. Thrice the recipient of the Patras Bokhari Award, the highest National Prize for Literature in English, he is a poet, essayist, short story writer, translator and scholar of Punjabi texts, as well as a calligrapher-artist, and art critic and art historian, Tahir has published over twenty books, including several volumes of poetry and essays, such as A Certain Season and Body Loom. His poems, also translated into Italian, Urdu, and Chinese, have been set as text for Secondary Schools and for the Cambridge O Level Syllabus, and have also been included in several OUP anthologies and in Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton & Co., USA). He is the Founder-Director of the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English (ICPWE) at the Kinnaird College, Lahore. He has been awarded the Tamgha-i Imtiaz (1998) and the Sitara-i Imtiaz (2009) for his works.