A Fractured Future

Pakistan, one of the most populous countries, is living in the future. The year is 2083, and on August 14, its citizens will observe Independence Day, which once commemorated the 1947 Partition of India. Now it’s a reminder of the civil war that broke out in the 2040s, which divided the urban landscape into New Pakistan —“a walled haven”— and the impoverished Old Pakistan. The latter was then carved into three sectors and an area known as the Badlands, a “squalid” place that most of its inhabitants, at some point in their lives, try to escape. There ashes from nuclear fallout come down in an everlasting grey snow, leaving many ill or dying from “Sky Sickness.”

Saad T. Farooqi’s debut, White World, unfolds in this dystopia. The novel’s narrator, Avaan Maya, is a gunslinging apostate who loses his entire family to violence. Orphaned, abused, and forced to come of age during the war, his only hope in 2083 is to reunite with Doua, his lover who went missing...