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.
Coming Thursday, June 11, 2026
- 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.