Memoir / Foreign Affairs
Orphaned
A Memoir of the Invisible War
by Shan Rizvi
On a Brooklyn rooftop, in the middle of a war no one will admit is being waged, a man decides not to jump. They say it is all in his head. So he turns to tell the story, and lets the reader decide.
Available now in ebook, paperback, and hardcover
- Ebook (Kindle)
- $9.99
- Paperback (5.5 × 8.5)
- $18.99
- Hardcover
- $26.99
- Audiobook
- Coming later
About the book
Orphaned is a memoir-investigation of a plausibly deniable war waged against one man, and against the West, by Pakistani, Chinese, and Iranian deep-state factions. Shan Rizvi was born in Karachi, studied in Helsinki and Stockholm, and built a life in New York. There, between 2024 and 2026, the war found him at home: a campaign of surveillance, sabotage, and pressure engineered to unravel him. The book reads that campaign as one front in a grey-zone war, traces it to the networks that made it possible, and braids the reporting with a philosophy of consciousness, seven open letters to heads of state, and poems written as the events unfolded.
He does not accuse. He notices. The evidence is on the page; the verdict is the reader's.
- Five books in one, and they reinforce each other: literary memoir, deep-state investigation, geopolitical analysis, a philosophy of consciousness, and lyric poetry.
- Reporting with receipts: built on a disciplined observation → pattern → interpretation method, footnoted throughout.
- A first-person seat: inside the "grey zone" most analysts only describe from outside.
- Timely: Pakistan's deep state, China's grey-zone warfare, Iran, press freedom, and transnational repression, all seen through a single life.
About the author
Shan Rizvi is a technologist and builder, Pakistani-origin, raised in Karachi, educated at the Helsinki and Stockholm Schools of Economics, and based in New York since 2017. He has built AI products including Thumos Care (a preventive-health platform profiled by Newsweek in July 2024) and MindGraph (a cognitive graph-memory system for AI). Orphaned is his first book. He reads English and Urdu.