The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil

by Shubnum Khan

Pan MacMillan

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate north of Durban. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.

 

“The city of Durban on South Africa’s east coast falls psychically somewhere between Miami and New Orleans. It’s sugarcane-sticky and portside-seedy, a little glam, a little Miss Havisham. Add vervet monkeys and a turbulent colonial history and Durban Gothic should already be its own genre. That it’s not means Shubnum Khan gets to set the tone with her magical and only gently haunted haunted-house novel…Despite the Gothic trappings, this is not a novel of creeping dread. It’s rich and swoony, tilting for the ecstasy of Sufi poets like Rumi, with a wink to those epic Indian romance movies Pinky adores…The love story at the heart of the novel is grand and gorgeous and brave…an ambitious delight, with rich characters and some exceptionally lovely writing…A decade ago, Khan’s photograph made her a sensation. I suspect her writing will do the same again. This is the start of a major career.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Khan’s prose is lush and lovely, her pacing skillful, and she successfully weaves a complex plot with a large cast. A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.” — Kirkus *starred review*

“A dark and heady dream of a book” about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous – Alix E. Harrow

‘The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil’ by Shubnum Khan is ‘a haunting, a love story, and a mystery – Daily Maverick

A surprising and unusual story by a rising star in new South African writing…  an engaging and highly memorable novel…  a delightful refuge in today’s troubled world – news24

 

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