Wish Maker cover

Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

"The Wish Maker is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s Pakistan, a story about two children and the family they grow up in, the people and the places they come to know and love. It's a story about Lahore, the city, seen gradually through the decades; a story about Benazir Bhutto and the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; a story about Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire. But the novel is also intended to be a meditation on the individual consciousness, a journey into the soul's capacity to know other souls, to recognize itself in others and to grant others the validity it grants itself, which is the validity of desire, of wanting more and better things all the time. This, the capacity for wish-making, for ascribing insatiability and incompletion to other people's ideas of themselves is the central concern of the book."--Ali Sethi.

Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?