Night of the Golden Butterfly

Name: Night of the Golden Butterfly
Price: 34.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781836743705

A Novel

Tariq Ali

$34.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Verso Books
02 June 2026

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Islamic life & practice; Globalization

Series: The Islam Quintet

Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, over twenty years in the writing, which has been translated into a dozen languages

Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the concluding novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun—known as Plato—an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where “human dignity has become a wreckage.” Plato, who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight, now wants his life story written.

As the tale unravels we meet Plato’s London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. “Naughty” Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals forces her to flee to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she becomes an overnight celebrity, hailed as the Diderot of the Islamic world; and there’s Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator’s first love. The daughter of a Chinese family long settled in Lahore, Jindie is now married to his best friend, a Republican heart surgeon in DC, whose children cannot forgive him for saving the life of a much-despised politician.

Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie’s family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade as Sultan Suleiman.

Night of the Golden Butterfly shows Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.

By: Tariq Ali
Imprint: Verso Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 241g
ISBN: 9781836743705
ISBN 10: 183674370X
Series: The Islam Quintet
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 02 June 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.

Reviews for Night of the Golden Butterfly: A Novel

Wonderfully exuberant and mischievous... [a] jewel box of a novel * Independent * If Pakistan is a land of untold stories, whispered conspiracy theories and closed-door mutinies, then thank heavens for Tariq Ali, whose access to its innermost secret chambers has made him the country's finest historian and critic * Fatima Bhutto, New Statesman * Ali pays perfect attention to detail, reminding the reader of the merits of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. Whether describing the bonds of friendship, the sights and sounds of Lahore or the state of Fatherland in the throes of a military dictatorship, the writer's grip on detail never slackens * Karachi Herald *