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Other Names for Love

Other Names for Love

‘Exceptional’ Sunjeev Sahota

Summary

On the train from Karachi, as dusk begins to fall, Fahad's dreams of his summer in London are fading. He is headed to Abad, the family's feudal estate, where his father intends to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family -- to make him a man.

Instead, over the course of one shimmering, indolent season, Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and by the people he meets: those who revere and revile his father; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and Ali, a teenager like him, whose presence threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Other Names for Love is a truly exceptional novel: a luminous tale of memory and desire, inheritance and love, and the search for a sense of home. Written with urgency and unusual beauty, it marks the arrival of a stunning new voice in fiction.

Reviews

  • A beautiful novel on the desire to leave and the hope to remain, the need to find oneself among one's people and away from them
    HISHAM MATAR, author of The Return

About the author

Taymour Soomro

Taymour Soomro is a Pakistani writer. He studied law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and the Southern Review, and he is the co-editor, with Deepa Anappara, of Letters to a Writer of Colour, an anthology on fiction, race and culture forthcoming in 2023. Soomro lives in London.
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