Aatish Taseer's Partition of the heart -

Aatish Taseer grew up in secular, pluralist India. His early influences included his mother's Sikhism, a Christian boarding school, and He-Man cartoons. Nagging behind this cultural abundance, however, was an absence: of his estranged father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer.

The best of Stranger to History is the son's journey of the subtitle: the movement towards - and away from - his father's world. Taseer describes the embarrassment, frustration and occasional joy of meeting his father and half-siblings, and of approaching a cultural and national identity which painfully excludes him. Alternating with this story is a more generalised journey into Islam, from the Leeds suburb that produced the 7/7 bombers, through Istanbul, Damascus and Mecca, to Iran and Pakistan. On the way Taseer observes the "cartoon riots", is interrogated by Iranian security officials and watches the response in his father's Lahore home to Benazir Bhutto's assassination. The writing is elegant and fluent throughout, the characters skilfully drawn.

There is at times a certain clumsiness in definition - is the Muslims' problem an obsession with or a denial of history? - and there are clumsy mistakes, as when Taseer drastically mistranslates an Arabic slogan. These weaknesses perhaps say more about our publishing and reading culture than they do about Taseer. After all, how seriously would we take a cultural analysis of Britain written by someone who speaks no English? Writers such as Pankaj Mishra and William Dalrymple offer much more interesting insights into modernity's cruel impact on traditional Islam, but Stranger to History shines when Taseer concentrates on what he knows best: the scar across the subcontinent, and across his own heart.