The title of the book under review comes from the English rendition of the title of Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s novel Khas-o-Khashak Zamanay, translated by Muhammad Safeer Awan, the author of this critical study. However, as the title suggests, and a close reading of the book endorses, fragility works as a sort of epistemological principle of Tarar’s oeuvre of fiction. While navigating times, events and characters’ lives, Tarar’s fictional imagination remains prone to capturing their fragile, unstable sides.

Awan, a notable critic, opines that the type of fiction Tarar has produced throughout is a “fiction of ideas”. In comparison to ‘fiction of situation’, which mostly revolves around linearity of time and interesting, well-connected events, ‘fiction of ideas’, the author explains, “depicts more abstract concepts: the dilemmas, the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the characters’ selves.”