The Nine Lives of Pakistan

Dispatches from a Precarious State

Author  Declan Walsh
The Nine Lives of Pakistan

Winner of the 2021 Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award

The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals.

On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a…