Before She Sleeps

In modern, beautiful Green City, gender selection, war and avirus outbreak have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels.The government uses terror and technological surveillance to control itspeople, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly aspossible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an undergroundcollective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by thehighest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the richand elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacywithout sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield themfrom discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment. This dystopian novelfrom one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable. It takesthe patriarchal practices of female seclusion, gender selection and controlover women’s bodies, and recasts them to imagine a world of terrifyingpostreligious authoritarianism.