In a small village in Awadh, fourteen-year-old Gibran's unlettered father wants him to get employed in a mosque. The boy attends the madrasa, memorizes his lessons, helps his Amma at home ... and yet, on freezing Friday mornings, when he must bathe before offering prayers, he wonders why there must be Fridays in winter!

Gibran's is an innocent world: he loves flying kites, flies even dragonflies by tying strings to their tails, skips the madrasa to watch the Nat's tamasha, gets caned for stealing a quarter-rupee coin and, when a cat grabs their hen, he asks why He who made the cat also made the hen.

One day, news arrives that his father has been arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and Gibran's world turns upside down. Faced with death, parting and abandonment, his only refuge might lie in a world of imagination.

Celebrated Urdu writer Mohsin Khan's acclaimed first novel, Allah Miyan's Workshop, now masterfully translated into English by Maaz Bin Bilal, is a story about childhood and its travails—humorous, tender, piercing, all at once.

About the Author

Mohsin Khan is an acclaimed Urdu writer with numerous works of fiction to his credit, including books for children. His debut novel, Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana, has been translated into Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Persian, and won the inaugural Bank of Baroda Award in 2023 for its Hindi translation.

Khan has also won prizes for the radio plays Khwabon ki Tabeer and Kaisi Kaisi Majbooriyan in the multilingual All India Radio national play contests in two different years. He has been honoured by the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi for his literary achievements and was the recipient of the Jashn-e-Adab Fiction Award, the Shan-e-Awadh prize by the U.P. Journalists Association and the Awadh Ratan.