With an international reputation for volatility, brutality and radical Islam, reports of Pakistan's imminent collapse are not unusual. But then Pakistan never behaves as one expects it to, as renowned journalist Declan Walsh knows well, having covered the country for over a decade. His travels across the country took him from the raucous port of Karachi to the gilded salons of Lahore to the lawless frontier of Waziristan, compiling a portrait of this land of contradictions through the people. He meets a crusading lawyer who risks her life for the rights of society's most marginalised, taking on everyone including the country's ruling military establishment, a swashbuckling, roguish politician who wages a mini-war against Taliban fighters, a business tycoon with a charismatic personality and street smarts who transitions into politics and appears to be doing that as successfully as everything else - till he takes up the wrong cause. Lastly, he meets the spy whose orders included surveilling Walsh himself in Pakistan and who might finally be able to provide the answer he has been looking for, that of his sudden expulsion from the country. Intimate and complex, unravelling the country's many mysteries of state and religion, this formidable book offers an arresting account of life in a country few truly understand.