Fiction: Nadeem Shakoor

Nadeem Shakoor

Alongside the advisory work, Nadeem Shakoor is a British Pakistani author whose fiction moves between the Chishti Sufi tradition of the subcontinent, the political history of Pakistan and colonial Punjab, and the tradecraft of the espionage novel. A qawwali sensibility (the pull of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, Aziz Mian, Fareed Ayaz & Abu Muhammad, the Wadali Brothers) runs underneath the prose even when the subject is a financial ledger or an intelligence file, because the questions are the same ones the qawwals ask: what is hidden, what is owed, and what survives suppression.

His novels are built from a small set of recurring convictions: that a civilisation's record goes underground rather than disappearing when its institutions are dismantled; that corruption, disappearance, and forced labour are one system rather than three; and that a dual identity (diasporic, operational, or theological) is a real condition to be inhabited on the page, not resolved for the reader's comfort. Chapters favour historically grounded detail, theologically rigorous sourcing from Ibn Arabi, Iqbal, Rumi, and Ghazali, and antagonists complex enough to make their own case.

John le CarréFrantz FanonKamila ShamsieArundhati RoyAllama IqbalIbn Arabi
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Series · Investigative Thriller

The Zebunisa Alam Thrillers

The Price of Truth arc. A Captain in the Pakistan Army who resigns her commission to become an investigative journalist, Zebunisa Alam works six cases that open, one at a time, onto the deeper architecture of power behind Pakistan's headlines: disappearance, dirty money, and the deals struck in private rooms before the public vote ever happens.

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The Register cover
Book ZeroThe Register
Before Zebunisa Alam was a journalist, she was a Transfer Order in someone else's file: the origin story of the Captain who will spend the rest of the series pulling other people's files out of the same cabinets.
The Price of Truth cover
Book OneThe Price of Truth
The series opener: a photograph, a USB drive, and a story that costs Zebunisa the safety of not knowing.
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Book TwoThe Cost of Conscience
Lahore, London, and Dubai's skylines converge behind her as the story's reach goes international, and the price of Book One comes due.
The Benefactors cover
Book ThreeThe Benefactors
Delaware corporations, a Luxembourg certificate, a Cayman Islands registration: Zebunisa follows the red and green threads on the board and finds they all lead back to the same benefactors.
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Book FourThe Gaza Chessboard
April 2022: a Pakistani prime minister is removed in a no-confidence vote the world accepts as constitutional. Zebunisa traces it back six months, to a private residence in Dubai's Emirates Hills, and a roadmap for Pakistan–Israel normalisation the man who was removed had refused to sign.
The Border Economy cover
Book FiveThe Border Economy
A government falls. A roadmap survives. Eighteen months after Pakistan's prime minister is removed, Zebunisa stands before the largest wall she's ever built, and for the first time there's no name at its centre, only a corridor between a mine and a port that five governments have each found a private reason never to examine. Two people are held inside that silence. To bring them home, she needs more than a story: she needs an extraction.
Series · Espionage

The Ash Pervez Spy Thrillers

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Both Sides of Silence cover
A Spy Caught Between Two Nations

Both Sides of Silence

Ash Pervez, twenty-three, British-Pakistani, is deployed to Islamabad as an intelligence officer under the cover of BridgeTech Ventures. His mission is to trace the money shaping Pakistan's future. His discovery is worse: the UK isn't observing the transition. It's directing it.

In a city where MI6, the CIA, and Chinese intelligence share the same tables and trade the same secrets, Ash has to choose between the institution that made him and the conscience that defines him. Both choices cost him something. Only one lets him live with himself.

Trilogy · Sufi Literary Fiction

The Shadow of the Chain

A trilogy built on the silsila, the unbroken chain of transmission at the heart of Sufi practice, tracing how a lineage of knowledge survives migration, rupture, and doubt across generations.

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The Shadow of the Chain cover
Book OneThe Shadow of the Chain
A secret buried in centuries. A moment that refuses to die. Neuroscientist Ammara and mathematician Zulqurnein Rahman uncover a pattern linking consciousness to centuries-old Sufi metaphysics, and awaken a chain that binds the living and the dead.
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Book TwoThe Doubled Moment
A single choice can echo forever. From the sacred geometry of the Tawaaf to the burning revelation of Sinai, the twins' journey exposes the Meridian Institute's secret experiment, and the truth that time itself bears witness.
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Book ThreeThe Third Chain
Every chain leads here. The trilogy closes against a theological framework drawn from Ibn Arabi's wahdat al-wujud, the doctrine of al-khalq al-jadid (perpetual renewal of creation), and Iqbal's philosophy of khudi, selfhood.
Standalone Novels

Literary & Historical Fiction

Six novels spanning Mohenjo-daro, Mughal and colonial Punjab, the Timurid Silk Road, and the diaspora's Glasgow, each asking what a civilisation keeps, and what it is forced to hide.

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SagaShadows of Defiance
A symphony of defiance in the twilight of empire: a five-generation Punjab trading family, from the Roshan Trading Company's ledgers in Ambala and Lyallpur's Katchery Bazaar, through Partition, to a grandson landing in London with a single suitcase.
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Dual TimelineThe Astronomer's Daughter
A Silk Road odyssey: a 15th-century astronomer's daughter and a present-day photographer retrace the same caravan route across five centuries, each carrying an instrument for reading the sky.
The First River cover
A NovelThe First River
2487 BCE: Mahi, a water administrator in Mohenjo-daro, seals sixty-one clay tablets behind a brick as her city's civilisation follows its river south. 2028: Dr Noor Baloch has spent two years alone with forty-seven of those tablets, undeciphered, in a sealed chamber, evidence that becomes, as she shares it, not archaeology but a reckoning. A companion volume to The Veils of Adab.
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When Melody Keeps the TruthThe Veils of Adab
When an external power dismantles the institutions that kept a civilisation's record, the record goes underground: into encrypted notebooks, into music, into the people who carry it.
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Five Thousand Years, One Unbroken SpiritSher-e-Punjab
The Lions of the Five Rivers. From Raja Porus meeting Alexander at the Jhelum to Bhagat Singh at the gallows, fourteen lives (warriors, saints, rebels, poets, rulers, revolutionaries) spanning five millennia of a land that answered invasion with resistance, oppression with defiance, and hardship with resilience. Not a history of battles, but of a civilisation forged by that endurance. Releasing October 2026.
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Straddling Two WorldsRoots & Raincoats
Lyallpur, Punjab, 1967: Zainab, eighteen, daughter of the village numberdar, marries Khalid and within a year is in a box room listening to rain on a Glasgow window. Their story runs from the factory floors of Govanhill to the Silver Jubilee of 1977, and into the children who grow up carrying two worlds without thinking about it.
Standalone Thrillers

Silence, Signal, Ledger

Three novels in the tradecraft register: le Carré's patience applied to Pakistani politics, financial architecture, and a scholar's slow awakening.

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Zero Over Zero cover
0/0 Wasn't a MistakeZero Over Zero
A techno-thriller of code and consequence. Twenty-two years of engineering have not made Pakistan's accountability equation resolve to zero; they've made it undefined. Shahid's investigation and Lubna's ledgers converge on the one number a system cannot process.
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An Ancient Thread, A Modern CipherThe Silk Matrix
A novel of finance, history, and code. A future worth building, traced along the old Silk Road from Samarkand to Shanghai, a geopolitical, cryptographic thriller trilogy in the le Carré register. Releasing September 2026.
Book OneThe Falling MinaretsNadeem Shakoor
A lower-middle-class Pakistani scholar, haunted by the slaughters in Palestine, Sudan, and Yemen, wakes his country from a thousand years of civilisational amnesia, armed with nothing but voice, faith, and the ordinary tools of modern communication. Releasing September 2026.
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For literary and press queries: author@nadeemshakoor.com

Author & ESG / AI Governance Advisor

Across genres and disciplines, the same instrument recurs: a record that survives suppression, a silence that finally speaks, a ledger made to answer for itself. Nadeem Shakoor writes and advises from the conviction that these are not separate practices: they are one discipline, applied at different registers.

— N. Shakoor
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