The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments in Karachi are looking for a miracle. Junior nurse, ex-prisoner and part-time healer Alice Bhatti is looking for a job.
With guidance from the working nurse's manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice starts work at the crowded hospital bringing help to the thousands of patients littering the corridors. But her new life isn't easy and on top of everything else Alice impulsively falls for optimist and loveable good Teddy Butt - a ragtag law enforcement officer by night and a bodybuilder by day.
Can Alice and Teddy live happily ever after? Will the hospital accept her unorthodox ways? It all seems unlikely, but then Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse and this is downtown Karachi where the unusual is ordinary .
From Bookforum
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti imbues all its moments with unsparing warmth and almost unbearable pathos. Jess Row
Review
"In this amusing novel, Hanif renders the intricacies and limitations of Pakistan's lowest rungs with humor and candor, allowing as little pity for his characters as they allow themselves." - Publishers Weekly
"Laced with humor, often ribald and iconoclastic, this is an insightful tale of pain and love, a story of a quest for humanity and grace in a desperate, chaotic society." - Kirkus Reviews
"Rambunctious, vulgar, funny and moving, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti wields enormous emotional punch..." - Time Magazine
"Hanif's storytelling is frequently impressive touching and unusual." - Faith Brinkley, Literary Review
"Perhaps Pakistan's brightest English-language voice This very finely put-together novel sparkles and glitters but never shows off... Hanif's novel is relentlessly readable, compulsively so as it surges towards its apocalyptic conclusion... sometimes the prose attains the heights of poetry Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is profoundly humane, and humanist." - Robin Yassin-Kassab, Guardian
"The 200 pages spent in Alice Bhatti's presence are distressing, illuminating and often funny In this bold, uncompromising novel, Hanif draws a compassionate and despairing portrait of a nation in bedlam." - Alice Albinia, Financial Times
"...one of the subcontinent's most compelling talents Hanif finds the humanity in the most flawed of his protagonists and, in some unfathomable way, ends up affirming it." - Scotsman