The author was 14 when her father Murtaza, brother of Pakistan's then prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed outside their home in Karachi. Before she was born her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who ruled the country in the 70s, was executed by the military regime that deposed him; and Murtaza's death was preceded by her uncle Shahnawaz's poisoning, and followed by the assassination of Benazir (once a beloved aunt, but by then long estranged) four years ago. So her mesmerising book often has the feel of a detective inquiry into the events of a Jacobean tragedy in which a dynasty is inexorably eliminated. But it's much more than that: a biography of her father; a memoir of a fractured, nomadic childhood largely spent in exile in Afghanistan and Syria; and a history of Pakistan since partition. What might have been a poignant but limited exercise in filial piety is instead a multi-layered work, as remarkable for its adroit interweaving of the personal and the political as for its ambitious scope.