"[Meatless Days] is, ultimately, a book of loss. The deaths of Suleri's mother and sister form the heart of this memoir; every moment is refracted through a lens of pain. . . . For all the verbal panache and structural ingenuity of Meatless Days, the final words I say about it must be this: I have never read a finer depiction of the fierceness of sibling love."
— Kamila Shamsie, Independent
“Dazzling. . . . For with her own recognition that history is not the exclusive property of her father’s copperplates, Suleri has set herself loose, a Proust in Pakistan, to wander among her own several lives.”
— Henry Louis Gates Jr., Voice Literary Supplement
“Suleri has chosen to take the fragments of a life, and related lives, into her palm, shake them, spread them out, then gather them up and give them another shake, as if she were playing with a kaleidoscope. . . . They are like the patterns carved out of lapis lazuli and agate, onyx and opal, set in the marble of Moghul tombs.”— Anita Desai,, Washington Post Book World
“Meatless Days takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author’s similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader, at least, alternately sated and hungering for more.”
— Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune
“A jewel of insight and beauty.”
— Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review