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Other Names for Love

Other Names for Love

‘Exceptional’ Sunjeev Sahota

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family?to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.

Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.

© Taymour Soomro 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

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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