Had Fatima Bhutto been left to her own devices, her devastating forthcoming memoir would have been almost entirely about her relationship with her dog, Coco. “I know it sounds nuts,” she laughs. And it’s true that being dog-crazy doesn’t quite track with the public perception of Bhutto as a writer, journalist, activist and member of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty. But the pandemic had forced something of a creative unravelling and when Bhutto took stock, she found herself only really able to write about Coco. Her agent politely suggested her memoir might need something more. A second draft was written, then abandoned.

“Until I thought, what if I just tell the truth? And then it fell out of me – it didn’t even pour, it fell.” In around three weeks Bhutto had reworked her draft and, in the process, revealed a shocking chapter of her life that she’d kept secret from everyone around her.

The resulting book, The Hour of the Wolf, is a raw, vulnerable account of an abusive, decade-long relationship that Bhutto endured, certain in her belief that this was love. It charts the painful realisation that this man (she only refers to him as The Man), who she writes is “unlike anyone that I have ever met: uninhibited, blazingly sure of himself … beautiful, rugged, old-school masculine … a free spirit”, had manipulated her into accepting that flashes of kindness and sporadic adventure were the real deal.

The two met in New York in 2011, when Bhutto was on tour with her sensational family memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. The book caused a major stir in Pakistan and beyond by re-evaluating the Kennedy-esque Bhutto dynasty; Fatima held her aunt, Benazir, partially responsible for her father’s murder. The grief was palpable.

Fatima embarked on a long-distance relationship with The Man, meeting around once a month over a period of 11 years. It suited her; she was often travelling for journalistic assignments or being invited to speak at literary events and festivals across the world. She wrote novels and essays. She was nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction. None of this was really of interest to The Man, who became controlling. His darker side was full of rage; he would treat her with abuse then silence, contempt and scorn. In Bhutto’s description, he would switch from dazzling to demonic without warning. He isolated her from her friends.

Her memoir is a short but astonishing account, articulated in such calm, quiet prose that it makes the burning cruelty of what Bhutto experienced all the more harrowing. Coco still features prominently. But mostly the book is a necessary reminder that being “strong”, accomplished, widely admired and fiercely clever doesn’t offer a protective shield. Frankly, none of these qualities offers a woman immunity from the psychological violence of a coercively controlling man.

“I didn’t really want to do it,” she says of writing about her relationship. “Because I felt ashamed, I felt embarrassed, I did feel all those kinds of things. But I also know that if I’d read something like this, it would have helped me.”

This is the first time Bhutto has spoken publicly about the book. The relationship ended in 2021 when, after years of her expressing a desire to have a family, to put down roots, even going through fertility preservation in Spain, Bhutto finally realised that The Man would never give her what she needed. She was 39. She left him, met her husband, Graham, in 2022 and had two babies within three years.

We are meeting in the Chelsea home of the friend, Allegra, who introduced them. Both women are present, along with Bhutto’s husband, their sons Mir and Caspian, and a babysitter, who is in the process of organising coats, boots and a pushchair for an outing to the park.

This is a home from home – the family largely live abroad but, for security reasons, Bhutto prefers not to specify where. “My toxic trait is that I think I can get through anything,” she says, when I ask, bluntly, how she put up with some of The Man’s most egregious behaviour. Not only did Bhutto endure it alone, but she recalls the delight he took in belittling her in front of an audience, routinely humiliating her in restaurants, in shops, on holiday. (There is one encounter in an electronics shop that I was willing to be the final straw, but their relationship continued for several more years.)

“I have a really high tolerance for stress or discomfort or whatever, and I just, for so long, had told myself this was the same thing.” Irrespective of the highs in their relationship, it’s awful to consider the extent to which Bhutto contorted her feelings or rationalised his. “The only way to survive 11 years of that is to think of it as a love story,” she says, almost with a shrug. “And you think it’s toughening you up for, you know, the great success that awaits you. You think that it’s hardening you up for life. And I did tell myself that. And also, because I didn’t tell anyone else anything, no one turned around to me and said: ‘What are you talking about?’”

Bhutto has always guarded her privacy – which makes her account all the more difficult and exposing – but that she didn’t tell any of her many friends that she had a boyfriend, let alone what their relationship was like, is hard to reconcile. This, of course, was due to the nature of the “love” The Man had manufactured between them: he insisted they had to remain a secret, they weren’t to indulge in “normal” behaviour such as meeting each other’s friends or family, living in the same city, let alone the same home.

“I had read stories and seen things throughout my life about women who’d been put in dangerous situations by men. I just never thought I was one of them because it hadn’t been physical, you know?” (She says this, though in the book she recounts that he once bit her finger so hard, it gave her nerve damage.) “So I just thought that that would never happen to me, that it could never happen. All the while it was happening, and happening, and happening, and I hadn’t connected it. I just thought the cliche was too obvious. You know, that someone wants to break a strong woman?” Bhutto projects poise, even when she’s being wry. “I mean, I was not young enough for this to be excusable.”

Was there a part of her, in the years she spent independently travelling and living all over the world, establishing her career, that thought this relationship was all she deserved?

“That’s the amazing thing,” she says, trying to reconcile her solid self-esteem against what she was put through. “There was no part of me that thought that. It was the opposite. I used to say to him: ‘If I hadn’t had the father I had, you would have damaged me. You know, if I had an absent father, if I had a father that was cruel, or if I had a father that never told me I was clever or smart or strong, you would have done harm to me.’ And he didn’t break me in the end.” On this she is clear. “I felt damaged by him, but I know that the damage he wanted to do was total.”

Bhutto’s father, Murtaza Bhutto, was the eldest son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of Pakistan People’s party (PPP) and prime minister of the country in the 1970s. The story of the Bhuttos is in many ways the story of Pakistan. Their family history is the nation’s history, and it is under the weight of immense scrutiny and violence that Fatima has lived her whole life.

Her grandfather Zulfikar was overthrown by a military coup and executed in 1979, in circumstances that sent shockwaves around the world. Three years later his youngest son, Shahnawaz Bhutto, a young radical fighting to overthrow the military dictatorship that killed his father, was found dead in Nice at 26 years old. The family have long believed he was poisoned.

Fatima was born in 1982, and spent her early years in her grandfather’s vast Karachi residence. She was close to her father, who retained sole parental custody after divorcing her mother when she was a toddler. After Shahnawaz’s death, the two of them spent the rest of her childhood living together – in exile – in Syria. Plainly, Fatima adored him and wrote Songs of Blood and Sword largely as a righteous biography of her father.

“This will sound disjointed,” she begins, “because this is the first time I’m thinking about it out loud. But I don’t think I had properly – to use a word that I find oof – ‘healed’ from my life, really. Not until after this relationship, because so much of what had traumatised me had been part of my life. The fear I had growing up really played in beautifully to this whole thing [with The Man]. The need for secrets? I understood that because I have had to live like that, even until now.” Being a Bhutto comes with significant baggage around security, which may partly explain why Fatima has lived such a peripatetic existence.

She recalls being told to pack a bag by her father and being whisked “on an adventure” countless times, upping and leaving with a moment’s notice. Of being really chatty as a young girl on the phone and then being told by her father not to talk to those calling the house. Not to give away any detail of where they were. “I adored my father because he adored me,” she says. “He would make it fun, so it wasn’t like you were holed up in some scary place. But you still understand, something’s not right.”

Political activism was a central tenet of family life, with all its associated danger. “The adults in my family never really hid anything from us. They didn’t ever say, ‘leave the room, children, because we have to talk about something’. That’s just how they talked.”

“I used to struggle with it because my father sometimes would say things like, ‘You know, when they kill me …’. And when I was much younger, I’d get really upset at these family lunches where they casually talked like that. He would never treat it as …” She pauses. “There was never any ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean that.’ That’s just how it was.”

Fatima and her father returned to Karachi in 1993. By then her aunt Benazir had assumed the role as head of the PPP and, at 35, served as the world’s youngest female prime minister, between 1988 to 1990. Despite a bitter feud with her brother about her right to lead the party, Benazir began her second term in 1993. Murtaza publicly accused his sister and her husband of political corruption and revived a breakaway faction of the PPP. Three years later, Murtaza was dead, killed by Karachi police in a brutal shoot-out outside the family home. Fatima was 14.

Fatima was left with her stepmother Ghinwa and her baby brother, Zulfikar Jr. For a while, the siblings lived secretly in Syria, for their own safety. “Again, they didn’t hide any of the stuff from us,” she says, trying to explain a childhood layered with contradictions, a collision of fear, privilege, violence and grief. “It was: ‘We’re sending you to Damascus on a flight at midnight. Don’t tell anyone that you’re going. Yes, keep the plan to see your friends tomorrow, nothing out of the ordinary, but you’re going to be gone by midnight.’ And so I asked: ‘Why do we have to go to Damascus?’ And I was told: ‘Well, we don’t know if they’re going to kill the children next.’” Bhutto recounts all of this flatly matter of fact. “Whether they intended to or not, they definitely traumatised us in this way.”

In 2007, Benazir was assassinated on the campaign trail while fighting to win her third term in office. Fatima bears a striking resemblance to her aunt. Their relationship was complicated, especially given the circumstances of her father’s death, but to this day the Bhutto family’s legacy can be seen in Pakistan; Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir’s widely reviled husband, is sitting his second term as president, and has assumed co-chairmanship of the PPP with his son, Bilawal.

Fatima remains deeply politicised. “It’s made me uncomfortable around power though, rather than craving it,” she explains. “I’m very well aware of the dangers of power. I’m not stupid enough to think, ‘Oh, if I went into politics, I’d be different’. I know no one is different.”

The question of whether she would follow in the family tradition receded a long time ago. But the urge to do something worthwhile still remains.

“There are moments when I feel in a rage about the world, that I think maybe there is a duty to be more involved, because maybe you can’t do anything from outside. Maybe you can’t do anything from writing. But there’s no appeal for me. I never think, ‘Oh, what I’d like right now is to surrender what dregs I have of privacy’. No.”

A passing glance at her writing and social media accounts for the past two years and more shows Bhutto to have been almost completely dedicated to Gaza, amplifying and giving voice to the horrors inflicted on Palestinians. She has continued this work through two pregnancies, culminating in the blistering book of essays she edited, Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, which was published last October.

“I couldn’t help thinking throughout the experience that, you know, when I was in labour, I was in a hospital. I had anaesthesia, I had an epidural, I had doctors, I wasn’t being bombed. I could reliably be left there and no one would have to worry for my safety.”

Bhutto has processed so much, in such a short time span, I wonder how she’s managed to stay sane and keep her composure. “You’ve got to, I don’t know, exist in this otherworldly kind of space where this isn’t happening.” “This” being anything from documenting Israeli war crimes to excavating her own personal history, all the while with a baby on her hip, husband and dogs in tow.

“I thought I was a fairly compassionate, sensitive person beforehand, but it just kind of rips you open in a new way.”

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

At times she sounds mystified by why the writing took so long. The book runs to almost 700 pages, “but then I also have to think there are authors who write books this long several times over. Look at Hilary Mantel or Dickens or Tolstoy.” Perhaps, she muses, “I was just writing this book over and over, and letting it take different forms.” By around 2013 her notes had swelled to 5,000 pages, and she puzzled over which strands she should extract and weave into a story. How far back in time should she travel, and how far forward? How far outwards should she expand from Sonia and Sunny to explore the lives of their friends and relatives?

Even when these questions felt unresolvable, she kept working. “It was just a stubbornness that I cannot explain,” she says. “I become very determined and very stubborn and not very nice if I am kept away from my writing.” She feels “lucky” that she was able to work with such intensity, because she does not have to fit her writing around children or family life. In the year or two after her Booker win she felt a sense of pressure, but over time “that self-consciousness fell away”, she says, “and I was just living in a very isolated way and working”. She phones her mother daily and visits her often in upstate New York, and she would see friends a few times a week. But mostly, for decades, she wrote alone at home in New York or on long trips to Mexico.

“There have been times in my life when I have been very, very solitary,” she says. So solitary that her social identity appeared to dissolve. “I didn’t think of myself as a person, particularly. I didn’t think of myself as being from somewhere. I didn’t think of myself as a woman, particularly, because I was so alone and what does it mean, without context?”

We meet at her home on a quiet street in Queens, where she migrates daily from her kitchen table to an upstairs desk to catch the best light. Copies of the UK editions of her book have recently been delivered and remain in a box at her front door. Even now, she finds herself thinking: “I really could have done it this way, if I had just taken that out and put it somewhere else … ”

Desai was 35 when she won the Booker – making her, at the time, the youngest woman to win – and now she is 54. She is slim, elegantly dressed in a pale pink linen tunic and dark pink trousers, a grey stripe running through her hair, and has a gentle, precise manner of speaking. To finish the book felt “anticlimactic”, she says, “because it’s ordinary life now, after living in a completely artistic world”. She doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, like her previous novel, is an epic, multistranded, sometimes darkly humorous family saga that takes on big political and philosophical themes. Sonia and Sunny are both Indian writers who moved to the US as students and whose paths first cross when Sonia’s family send Sunny a marriage proposal. The proposal goes nowhere, because Sunny is dating an American woman and has no interest in old-fashioned customs. Sonia herself is in thrall to Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a needy, abusive, much older artist.

Many of the “loving” relationships in this novel, whether romantic or familial, are destructive, uneven, constrictive. The characters turn to art as a salve and means of escape from their difficult or disappointing lives, but art is also another source of exploitation. Ilan is a thief and a parasite, who profits from the suffering of others. He, in turn, gives himself entirely over to his art. “If you are a good artist … you give more of your life to art, you begin to subtract your life so it becomes such an emptiness that you dare not look upon it,” he tells Sonia. Does Desai ever feel that way about herself? “I do feel that I made that exchange,” she says. “I don’t regret it but … it did displace my life. Or maybe I just filled it up.”

Desai says she has always “lived in her head”, but growing up in Delhi, the youngest of four siblings, she was never alone. Her father worked for an oil company, and her mother was expected to support him, which meant putting on a beautiful silk sari every evening and either hosting or attending a party. Desai speaks with admiration of her mother’s resourcefulness, how she nonetheless found the time and confidence to write, and managed to fill the family bookshelves with hard‑to-find books. Anita Desai was nominated for the Booker three times, but the children understood her fame “sort of backwards”, only when their mother’s glamorous foreign-language translators began coming to stay. “It opened up the door to the world and eventually she stepped through it and left, and took me with her,” Desai says. When she was a teenager, her mother was offered a fellowship at Cambridge and Desai, the only child still at home, went to the UK with her.

“It was scary to me, because I had never left India,” Desai recalls. She found it “startling” to witness the vast power divide between the two nations, something for which her voracious reading of British children’s classics did not prepare her. “I could not put it together with Paddington Bear and The Wind in the Willows and all kinds of other books I read early on that were so strange,” she says. In the end, the book that best helped her understand her immigrant experience was VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival.

A year after moving to Cambridge, she and her mother emigrated to Amherst, Massachusetts, and Desai enrolled in a US high school. “I have to say that in comparison to India the American system of education seemed so unbelievably easy, you just got smiley faces and encouragement,” she jokes.

She went on to Bennington, a liberal arts college in Vermont, where she took her first creative writing class. “I remember just being so happy, the first story I wrote,” she says. It was called Hair Oil, about a man obsessed with his hair; the next was about a snooty civil servant sent to rural India. “Very odd,” she says, laughing. “I don’t know why I was writing those stories.” She also began working on her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published in 1998, a satire about a young man who goes to live in a guava tree and is mistaken for a holy man.

Shortly after, Desai completed an MFA at Columbia University in New York. She found that one downside to studying creative writing is that when your work is regularly read by a group it “makes you very, very self-conscious – and you need to lose that to be able to write well”. Afterwards she did not join writers’ groups and she wrote The Inheritance of Loss the “old-fashioned way”, alone, over seven years. Her mother is always her first reader, because she understands instinctively what her daughter is trying to achieve. “She knows the landscape I’m working from, so she understands what I am trying to do, even though it’s not yet on the page,” she says.

In Desai’s new novel, Sonia is working on a story that sounds very similar to Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, and she shows it to Ilan, who tells her to stop writing “orientalist nonsense” and to keep away from magical realism or subjects such as arranged marriages. “He’s uttering something that a lot of people say, and is a legitimate thing to say,” Desai explains. Like Sonia, she has grappled with the question of how India should be represented to a western readership, and she ultimately includes several arranged marriage plots and an element of magical realism in the novel.

As Sonia learns, there are no simple answers. In the novel, Sonia changes one of her stories so that the character eats an apple rather than a guava, rendering it less “exotic” to western readers but also less true, because apples are more expensive and less plentiful in India. “Most marriages in India are arranged, that is the truth of the matter. But should you not write about it because of the audience it’s going to be sold to? I think a lot of it comes down to: are you a good or a bad writer?”

Desai has been a New Yorker for more than 25 years, but until her father’s death in 2008 she visited India every year. Now that the family home has been sold (her parents were separated after she and her mother moved to the US), she visits less frequently, and she felt this novel might be her last chance to write about India. She wanted to take a snapshot of the country around the turn of the millennium, when Hindu nationalism began rising and dinner party conversations shifted in ways that alarmed Desai. “You would be in the living room with friends and suddenly something else was acceptable,” she remembers. When she visited India last winter, she was struck by the fear expressed by friends from religious minorities. “I did learn the lesson that when fear enters a nation that’s almost the end of it. And I never thought it would happen in the United States as well,” she says, but now she sees similar fear in her multicultural neighbourhood of Jackson Heights. “Underneath the subway tracks, before Trump was elected, it was very lively. People were selling arepas and tacos and skewers of food and religious charms and breads, and actually a lot of women soliciting prostitution,” she says. But now many of these enterprises have been shut down. “People are very scared,” she says, because of immigration raids.

Desai loves living in this diverse community, and at a healthy remove from the New York literary scene. She lives next to families from Ireland and Tibet, and until his recent death she used to often visit her nonagenarian Egyptian neighbour to drink coffee under his fig tree and hear stories of his upbringing in Alexandria – “so I wasn’t entirely solitary”, she concedes. We take a walk along a row of South American restaurants and grocery stores and phone shops and money exchanges until suddenly she stops and says, delighted: “Can you smell that? Curry!” Within one block, the culture of the street has shifted, completely, from South America to the Indian subcontinent. She points out the best kebab shops and we stop to admire the opulent, gem-encrusted, 24-carat gold wedding jewellery. A man hands us each a business card promoting a “World Famous Indian Astrologer” and Desai notices, amused, that as well as reuniting lovers and securing promotions, this man purports to solve the ambiguous “kids mistake” (sic). She shows me the tucked-away Tibetan dumpling shop that Sunny visits in the book, and the bank he frequents.

At 4.30pm, her mother phones, as is their tradition. Anita Desai is 88 and has had a few falls recently, and Desai, who of the four siblings lives closest and is her first port of call, was very worried about leaving her mother to go on book tours. She had inadvertently added to her anxiety by reading several books set in old people’s homes, including Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again – the latter passed to her by her mother, who said: “You should read this, it’s terrifying!” Despite this, her mother, who is “thrilled” Desai’s novel is finished, has been urging her not to hold back on any travel plans.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has already been longlisted for the Booker prize, which Desai says feels like remarkable recognition. “I feel relieved, as if I have averted some nebulous disaster, and very lucky,” she says. She is not yet ready or able to start a new project but already knows that whatever comes next for her, it cannot be quite as ambitious in scope. “I could never do it again, it would not be strategically smart,” she says. “This feels like the big book of my life in that way. I don’t have time to do it again.”