The Spinner’s Tale

Description

A racy thriller about two friends whose lives diverge drastically when one of them becomes an infamous jihadi militant. Sheikh Ahmed Uzair Sufi is one of the most feared men in Pakistan, a top Jihadi militant, who believes in nothing save his own limitless scope for violence. But no one suspected this future back in 1994, when he was simple old Ausi and leaves school with his cricket mad best friend Eddy to start a new life. While Eddy goes to college in America, Ausi’s life takes dangerous and unexpected turns. The two friends stay in touch even as they pursue vastly different lives, their shared passion for cricket and nostalgia for their school days binding them together. Even as Ausi treads down a darker path, what will happen to their friendship?

Omar Shahid Hamid, bestselling author of The Prisoner, takes us on another thrilling, sinister ride, stretching from Karachi to Kashmir to Afghanistan, in The Spinner’s Tale.

Author Biography

Omar Shahid Hamid has been a police officer for 20 years. Now a deputy inspector general, his entry into the police was precipitated by the murder of his father Shahid Hamid, Managing Director of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation, while Omar was a university student, and by his meeting with Karachi’s brave cop, Chaudhry Aslam Khan, who captured his father’s murderer. As part of Sindh Police’s Counter-Terrorism department, Omar has survived being ambushed by gangsters, and implicated by colleagues in a false case: in 2011, after he barely escaped a bombing of his offices by the Taliban, he took a five-year sabbatical to study in the UK, write books, and later work as Head of Asia Analysis at IHS Global Insight, and as the Asia Editor for IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly and IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review. He has an MS in Criminal Justice Policy from LSE, an LLM from UCL, and an LLB from the University of Kent, UK. In 2016, he returned to active duty as a counterterrorism officer in Pakistan. He has been widely quoted and featured in several publications including The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Le Monde, Reuters, CNN, and BBC.

His first book, The Prisoner (2013), was longlisted for the DSC South Asia Literature Prize and is being adapted for a feature film. He won the Karachi Literature Festival Fiction Prize in 2017 for The Spinners Tale (2015) and again in 2018 for The Party Worker (2017). The Spinner’s Tale also won the Italy Reads Pakistan Award at the KLF in 2017. The Party Worker was contracted in March 2019 for a Netflix adaptation. The Fix (2019) explored the arcane world of cricket match-fixing. Betrayal is his fifth novel.