Other Names for Love: 'Exceptional' Sunjeev Sahota

Description

For readers of Damon Galgut, Brandon Taylor and J M Coetzee, an atmospheric story of love and violence in rural Pakistan from an exceptional new literary voice 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.

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.

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 An exceptional novel about fathers and sons, desire and love, and the long reach of the past -- SUNJEEV SAHOTA, author of China Room Such a deftly told and evocative story of duty, masculinity and desire -- KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Home Fire A twenty-first century variation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons... Taymour Soomro is a thrilling new addition to international literature -- YIYUN LI, author of Must I Go This haunted, haunting novel is about the cruelties we commit in our search for freedom and the bonds from which we can never be free. Taymour Soomro's piercing insight is that both the freedom and the bonds are constituent of love -- Garth Greenwell, author of CLEANNESS and WHAT BELONGS TO YOU