Night of the Golden Butterfly

The final volume of the Islam Quintet follows a narrator who is called upon to repay a debt of honour by writing the life of Mohammed Aflatun, a Pakistani painter known as Plato. Moving between Lahore, London, Paris, Beijing and the United States, the novel reconnects old friends whose lives have been shaped by migration, politics, artistic ambition and lost love. Their contemporary stories are interwoven with the history of Jindie’s Chinese Muslim ancestors and the nineteenth-century Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan, bringing the series’ exploration of memory and displacement into the modern world.