Boys Will Be Boys

Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, set around the women of her family—her grandmother, mother and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humour and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z.A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his ‘patriotic and preposterous’ disposition).

Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure—ardent agitator against the British, founder of the Times of Karachi, editor of Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. Through it all, she invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction.

‘‘ Praise for Meatless Days• ‘Suleri has chosen to take the fragments of a life, and related lives, into her palm, shake them, spread them out, then gather them up and give them another shake, as if she were playing with a kaleidoscope… They are like the patterns carved out of lapis lazuli and agate, onyx and opal, set in the marble of Moghul tombs’’
Anita Desai, Washington Post Book World• ‘A jewel of insight and beauty’’
Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review‘Brilliantly contemplated and elegantly narrated…’ — The Statesman