Author(s): Taymour Soomro

Fiction

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.

Other Names for Love is a story of love and violence in Pakistan. It opens on a night train across the desert. Sixteen-year-old Fahad is travelling with his father Rafik to the family's farmlands, tamed from the jungle and now the locus of the older man's volatile power. Fahad doesn't want to be there- he is supposed to be in London with his mother for trips to galleries and the theatre. But what begins as a summer under duress evolves into an experience that will shape the rest of Fahad's life. Masterful in its compression, modern classic in feel, and with an almost hallucinatory sense of place, this unsettling, often heart-rending novel explores unspoken desire and its consequences within a feudal society run for and by men. It is about exile, return, and memory; about what it means to be a father and a son.

Reminiscent of Damon Galgut, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor and J M Coetzee.