Author: Maha Khan Phillips
Publisher: Penguin Books India, PB
Book review by Santanu Ganguly

Beautiful From This Angle, the debut novel by Maha Khan Phillips, is not what it seems to be. The author chooses the well-known chick-lit technique of bringing together three women friends to undergo a transformational experience, yet this book is not “chick-lit” in the strictest sense. The social scene of Karachi’s jet set is the backdrop for the events of the book, yet the book’s primary focus is not social satire. And while Phillips cleverly explores the “oppressed woman” genre of popular fiction, she stands all the tropes on their heads, in order to deliver a severe indictment of the way modern media works in a post 9-11 world.

Phillips, a Pakistani-based London journalist, certainly knows her setting well: the Karachi party crowd in all its glory is exposed and eviscerated: it’s in the midst of the cocaine-snorting, drunken, promiscuous antics that we meet Amynah Farooqi, “Party Queen on the Scene” who’s actually an Oxford graduate, wasting her life doing cocaine and sleeping with as many men as she pleases. This anti-heroine is joined by Mumtaz, daughter of a drug lord, and Henna, daughter of a feudal: three best friends who drift aimlessly along until a common cause unites them briefly before destroying them all.