Junoon E Yar By Nazish Ali

About this novel

Junoon e Yar (Urdu: جنونِ یار) by Nazish Ali is a long Urdu gangster romance of friendship, revenge and love, and it opens with a killing. The writer tags it with gangsters, revenge and romance, and the story never slows down after that first shocking scene.

A man begs for forgiveness and promises never to do it again. The woman in front of him isn’t in a forgiving mood. Within a page he’s dead, and she straightens her coat, puts on a mask, pins her hair into a bun and walks out. She is Ganga, only about twenty, yet already so feared that people who meet her can’t believe a girl like her is a killer. She always lets her victims see her face before they die. Her older partner tells her to have the body dumped where the family will find it, and then brings worse news: some of their gang have been picked up by the police.

دوستی، انتقام، گینگ اور جنون: ایک ہی کہانی میں۔

Then Nazish Ali switches to something completely different. Three college friends, Rubaina, Nazish and Nimra, are setting off together: Rubaina with her hands on her hips, teasing; Nazish in white, with fair round cheeks and loose strands of hair; Nimra running late as usual and knowing she’ll be told off for it. They’re all around twenty, but they laugh and squabble like children, eating ice cream on the way to college while the whole street watches them.

The novel is built on the gap between those two worlds, and the opening pages make you wonder how and when they’ll collide. It’s a very long read at 1,092 pages, with plenty of action, friendship and junoon along the way. Readers who don’t like violence should know the first scene doesn’t hold back.

You can read Junoon e Yar online here or download the complete PDF for free. For another dark, intense story, try Dastan e Junoon by Hamna Mohsin or Tawaif by Hamna Tanveer.