cover image Duty Free

Duty Free

Moni Mohsin. Broadway, $13 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-307-88924-9

The lady of the house is a social-climbing shopaholic, yapping yenta, and mistress of malapropism, but her hilarious and unsettling story unfolds not in Manhattan but in Lahore, Pakistan%E2%80%94a land of Taliban "beardo-weirdos," shifting social mores, and a growing middle class. Mohsin's first novel to be published in America offers biting social satire%E2%80%94a news ticker runs atop each page with increasingly bloody and startling news-of-the-day%E2%80%94and a tale of redemption, gently skewering her vacuous heroine as she transforms from elitist snob to social maverick. The evolution unfolds as the Social Butterfly is commissioned by her manipulative aunt to play matchmaker for shy, divorced cousin Jonkers. But with just two months to get him hitched to a woman with a fab "bagground," she invariably comes up with all the wrong choices: lesbian Tanya, and Tasbeeh, divorced daughter of a drug-smuggler. In the end, though, Jonkers just may find love all by himself. Mohsin writes firecracker prose and crafts a blazing voice for her Prada-mad heroine, a snappy vixen-type readers will recognize instantly, even if she's never got a cosmo in her hand. (Sept.)