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The Wasted Vigil, a new novel by Pakistan-born, London-based author Nadeem Aslam, is remarkable for being at once topical and timeless – a complex and layered vision of contemporary Afghanistan, where ‘even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare.’ Here, in a crumbling mansion near Jalalabad, Marcus – a widowed Brit who lost his Afghan wife, Qatrina, to the Taliban – provides refuge for an assortment of outcasts and searchers: Lara, from St. Petersburg, whose brother disappeared two decades ago during the Soviet occupation; David, a former CIA spy who returns after 9/11, disillusioned and still aching over his vanished lover, Zameen; and Casa, a young Afghan jihadist, who ends up on the run from both an Al Qaeda-backed warlord and American special forces. In the dusty landscape dubbed ‘the graveyard of Empires,’ their stories crisscross and collide.

The house itself – its walls decorated with drawings created using a lost Islamic art, and its ceilings festooned with books that Qatrina attempted to hide from the Taliban – is one of Aslam’s most arresting creations: a haunted vision evoking ‘the ruin of golden Islam.’ Like Michael Ondaatje before him, Aslam has a way of breathing life into larger historical and political backdrops with sensual details and lush interior lives. The Wasted Vigil shimmers with moments of poetic beauty and seems destined, like The English Patient, to become a classic of modern, globalised literature. ‘Pull a thread here,’ Aslam writes of war-ravaged Afghanistan, ‘and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.’

But Aslam’s novel is not woven strictly from recent headlines. In fact, much of The Wasted Vigil developed more than a decade ago while Aslam was working on his second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, set in the working-class Pakistani communities of Northern England. “About 80 percent of the idea for this book was there when I finished my first novel, Season of the Rainbirds,” he says in a soft but insistent voice over the phone. “When the U.S. averted its gaze from Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the country descended into civil war and thousands of people started dying every month,” he says. “That seemed like an urgent subject to me.”

Aslam, who moved to England with his family in 1980 at the age of 14, paid close attention as the complexion of the region changed in the ’90s, with the emergence of the Taliban and the appearance of Al Qaeda elements linked to the Pakistani military. “I would periodically update my Afghan novel,” he says. “But I ended up finishing Maps for Lost Lovers first, because the topic of immigration felt just as necessary. Something was beginning to rot at the core of the Muslim community in the West.” The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave The Wasted Vigil an additional geopolitical point of reference – and a broader scope. “After the tragedy of 9/11, what had been until that point the tragedy of Afghanistan became everyone’s tragedy,” Aslam says.

Where Maps for Lost Lovers was confined to the enclosed world of immigrants, The Wasted Vigil stretches across the globe – from Russia to America, from Pakistan refugee camps to jihadist training centres – to show the repercussions of the great ideological battles of the past decades. “At one point in the novel, Marcus says the Cold War was only cold for the privileged places of the planet,” Aslam points out. “The Cold War got pretty hot over there in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the rest of the Third World.”

The Wasted Vigil recalls more distant struggles as well, from Alexander the Great’s conquests to the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century. Along the route of the old Silk Road, a crossroads of civilisations for centuries, Aslam brings together his nuanced tales of love and loss, madness and destruction – where Americans clash with Americans over tactics and torture, and Muslims are divided among themselves over their conflicting beliefs. Marcus, who converted to Islam when he married Qatrina, for example, has room for music and wine, art and literature in his faith, worlds away from Casa’s rigid, vengeful interpretation.

Flashbacks to Qatrina’s artwork, in fact, provide another of the book’s lasting images, and a metaphor for Aslam’s approach to writing. “I describe how Qatrina makes a sketch and then puts a colour onto it, then adds another layer and then another,” Aslam explains. “She then dips the whole painting into a tray full of coloured water, so that it’s now suffused with even more colour.” Her overlapping colours, like the complicated global forces at work in the novel, ultimately blend and bleed together. “That’s how I like to make my books,” Aslam adds, “because we are now more aware than ever that the world is interconnected. Action in one place has consequences elsewhere.”