Mohammed Hanif. (2012). Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mohammed Hanif. 2012. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mohammed Hanif, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Mohammed Hanif. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780307958457
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B0067TGTEY
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
     2. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780307958457
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 0307958310

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Mohammed Hanif

title

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

dateAdded

2012-08-09T11:34:02.757-04:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=715485
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

crossRefId

715485

id

f2d7eeaf-9e38-45a2-9fb6-c33e9d1ed355

starRating

2.8

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: OurLadyofAliceBhatti_9780307958457_715485
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 2554399
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780307958457
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 5/29/2012
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
        • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/OurLadyofAliceBhatti9780307958457.epub
     2. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: OurLadyofAliceBhatti_715485
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B0067TGTEY
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 5/29/2012
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
        • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/OurLadyofAliceBhatti9780307958457.epub
     2. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: OurLadyofAliceBhatti_9780307958457_715485
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780307958457
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 216828
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 5/29/2012
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
        • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/OurLadyofAliceBhatti9780307958457.epub
     2. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: family
2. • value: relationships
3. • value: future
4. • value: Graduation
5. • value: spiritual
6. • value: Friendship
7. • value: get
8. • value: literary fiction
9. • value: romance
10. • value: Humor
11. • value: student
12. • value: mother
13. • value: Nurses
14. • value: Doctor
15. • value: Fiction
16. • value: Well
17. • value: novels
18. • value: clean
19. • value: marriage
20. • value: love
21. • value: satire
22. • value: Comedy
23. • value: feminist
24. • value: funny
25. • value: Short Stories
26. • value: mystery
27. • value: for
28. • value: nurse
29. • value: Who
30. • value: adults
31. • value: gifts
32. • value: gift
33. • value: feminism
34. • value: indian
35. • value: Men
36. • value: joke
37. • value: Self Improvement
38. • value: nursing
39. • value: Essays
40. • value: Chick Lit
41. • value: Books
42. • value: Medical
43. • value: literature
44. • value: fiction books
45. • value: school
46. • value: funny books
47. • value: humor books
48. • value: humorous books
49. • value: satire fiction
50. • value: funny gifts
51. • value: realistic fiction books
52. • value: books fiction
53. • value: award winning books for adults

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Hanif, Mohammed
   • bioText:

     Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan. He graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy as Pilot Officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He has written for stage, film and BBC Radio. His first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel. He was the head of the BBC Urdu Service in London and now works as their special correspondent based in Karachi.

   • name: Mohammed Hanif

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2012-05-29T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

fullDescription

From the author of the acclaimed A Case of Exploding Mangoes (“An insanely brilliant, satirical first novel . . . Belongs in a tradition that includes Catch-22”—The Washington Post), a subversively, often shockingly funny new novel set in steaming Karachi, about second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in the most unlikely places.
   The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments need a miracle. Alice Bhatti may be just what they’re looking for. She’s the new junior nurse, but that’s the only ordinary thing about her. She’s just been released from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. But more to the point, she’s the daughter of a part-time healer in the French Colony, Karachi’s infamous Christian slum, and it seems she has, unhappily, inherited his part-time gift. With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice begins to bring succor to the patients lining the hospital’s corridors and camped outside its gates. But all is not miraculous. Alice is a Christian in an Islamic world, ensnared in the red tape of hospital bureaucracy, trapped by the caste system, torn between her duty to her patients, her father and her husband—who is a former bodybuilding champion, now an apprentice to the nefarious “Gentleman’s Squad” of the Karachi police, and about to drag Alice into a situation so dangerous that perhaps not even a miracle will be able to save them. But, of course, Alice Bhatti is no ordinary young woman . . .
   At once a high comedy of errors and a searing illumination of the seemingly unchangeable role of women in Pakistan’s lower-caste society, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a resounding confirmation of Mohammed Hanif’s gifts of storytelling and of razor-sharp social satire.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 19, 2012
     Absurdity and chaos reign in rising Pakistani author Hanif’s rowdy fusion of social commentary and curiously bloody love story. Being female, Catholic, and untouchable makes nurse Alice Bhatti a minority three times over in Pakistan, where “most of life’s arguments settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.” Impudent, headstrong, and possibly gifted with her father’s healing touch, Alice has risen out of the Christian slum, no small feat when most Catholic untouchables are sweepers. At the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, Alice punishes those who would harm her, wielding a razor with the same nonchalance that the doctors wield stethoscopes; she dispatches one would-be rapist with blood-splattering ease. The perpetrators are often those who “wouldn’t drink from a tap that she has touched have no problem casually poking their elbows into her breast.” Her violence attracts Teddy Butt, a weightlifter and underling in the Karachi police, and soon Alice must navigate the surprising parameters of an inter-religious and inter-caste marriage. In this amusing novel, Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) renders the intricacies and limitations of Pakistan’s lowest rungs with humor and candor, allowing as little pity for his characters as they allow themselves. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2012
     In Hanif's (A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008) second literary effort, Alice Bhatti lives in a land where "most of life's arguments...got settled by doing various things to a woman's body." Alice is a young nurse, a Christian, in Muslim Pakistan. Alice is a Choohra, an untouchable. Alice is also a graduate of Borstal Jail for Women and Children. That's because outspoken Alice made an easy target at the end of her nursing training when blame needed to be affixed for a botched operation. Sentence complete, with the help of sympathetic but ineffectual Dr. Jamus Pereira, Alice has secured a nursing position at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments near French Colony, Karachi's Christian slum. Outsider and renegade, openhearted and cynical, Alice is a strikingly memorable character. Willing to help teenaged Noor nurse his cancer-filled mother, Alice is equally willing to defend herself by razor-nicking the male member of the family of a privileged patient. Hanif's setting is spot on: Karachi as Karachi-Western-misperceived, squalor and discrimination perfectly logical alongside the "Gentlemen's Squad," an off-the-books police operation rough-riding through interrogations that produce dead witnesses. Alice is soon courted and married by Teddy Butt, a waxed-hairless, steroid-consuming body-builder and latent misogynist, who "provides valet parking for the angels of death" as the squad's combination errand boy and clean-up man. Much of the first two-thirds of the novel is focused on the artful setting and the deepening of character development, and then Alice, praying "in the heat of demented devotion," resuscitates an apparently stillborn boy. Alice is certain there are scientific reasons for the baby springing to life, but rumors of miracles soon fly around the hospital and out among the want-to-be-patients languishing under a courtyard tree called Old Doctor. It is there too that Alice rests to await her destiny. Laced with humor, often ribald and iconoclastic, this is an insightful tale of pain and love, a story of a quest for humanity and grace in a desperate, chaotic society.

     COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2011
     

     Having made a name for himself with the bitterly funny A Case of Exploding Mangoes, about the unexplained plane crash that killed the Pakistani dictator, General Zia, in 1988, Hanif returns with a story at once intimate and likely as biting as his debut. Just out of prison and Catholic in Karachi, which isn't easy, Alice Bhatti gets a job as a junior nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital--a last-resort public institution. There, she and off-and-on police goon Teddy Butt fall in love. A novel of hope in a dark world, relevant to us all.

     Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 15, 2012
     

     Alice Bhatti has many strikes against her. She is an outspoken woman, an ex-convict, and a Christian in a Muslim society, born into a family of untouchables seen fit only to sweep the streets and unclog the sewers of Karachi, Pakistan. She rises above her station to become a nurse in a hospital serving the poor, but her life veers off course when she impulsively agrees to marry Teddy, a Muslim bodybuilder and violent thug who works as a shadow figure for the corrupt local police. Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) paints an oblique portrait of his tough heroine, built up largely of others' impressions of her. He manages to balance Alice's mostly secular worldview with the strains of religious and magical thinking swirling around her. VERDICT This is a difficult, affecting, and ambitious story, bleak yet imbued with humor, which serves as a powerful indictment of a society in which "most of life's arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman's body." [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/11.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

     Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

53

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/f2d7eeaf-9e38-45a2-9fb6-c33e9d1ed355/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

f2d7eeaf-9e38-45a2-9fb6-c33e9d1ed355

starRating

3.1

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/F2D/7EE/AF/{F2D7EEAF-9E38-45A2-9FB6-C33E9D1ED355}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature

publishDateText

05/29/2012

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780307958310

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

From the author of the acclaimed A Case of Exploding Mangoes (“An insanely brilliant, satirical first novel . . . Belongs in a tradition that includes Catch-22”—The Washington Post), a subversively, often shockingly funny new novel set in steaming Karachi, about second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in the most unlikely places.
   The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments need a miracle. Alice Bhatti may be just what they’re looking for. She’s the new junior nurse, but that’s the only ordinary thing about her. She’s just been released from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. But more to the point, she’s the daughter of a part-time healer in the French Colony, Karachi’s infamous Christian slum, and it seems she has, unhappily, inherited his part-time gift. With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice begins to bring succor to the patients lining...

sortTitle

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

crossRefId

715485

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC051000
   • description: Fiction / Cultural Heritage
3. • code: FIC052000
   • description: Fiction / Satire