A message to married men having extra-marital affairs: beware of fathering a child with your mistress and then abandoning them. One day said child may discover literary inclinations and write a book that you may find humiliating in the extreme. Never mind the old adage. Stranger to History is a case of hell hath no fury like filial scorn.

Aatish Taseer is marvellously suited to writing this book about personal identity, religion and a quest to make sense of his past. With a Pakistani politician father and Indian journalist mother he neatly straddles the divide that Partition engraved across the subcontinent. And several years studying and working