Awais Reza is a shopkeeper in Lahores Anarkali Bazaarthe largest open market in South Asiawhose labyrinthine streets teem with shoppers, rickshaws, and cacophonous music.

But Anarkalis exuberant hubbub cannot conceal the fact that Pakistan is a country at the edge of a precipice. In recent years, the easy sociability that had once made up this vibrant community has been replaced with doubt and fear. Old-timers like Awais, who inherited his shop from his father and hopes one day to pass it on to his son, are being shouldered aside by easy money, discount stores, heroin peddlers, and the tyranny of fundamentalists.

Every night before Awais goes to bed, he plugs in his cell phone and hopes. He hopes that the city will not be plunged into a blackout, that the night will remain calm, that the following morning will bring affluent and happy customers to his shop and, most of all, that his three sons will safely return home. Each of the boys, though, has a very different vision of their, and Pakistans, future.

The Bargain from the Bazaarthe product of eight years of field researchis an intimate window onto ordinary middle-class lives caught in the maelstrom of a nation falling to pieces. Its an absolutely compelling portrait of a family at riskfrom a violently changing world on the outside and a growing terror from within.