Noon
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Set over two decades of convulsive change, Noon is the moving story of Rehan Tabassum, a young man whose heart is split across two cultures' troubled divide.
Rehan's mother and her new husband are the embodiment of a dazzling, emergent India. Yet as the old, muted order of dust and shortages recedes, Rehan finds himself unmoored. With his father still a powerful shadow across the border in Pakistan, Rehan's journey begins: through lands of sudden wealth and hidden violence, in an atmosphere of political quicksand and moral danger, towards the centre of a dark, shifting world.
Noon is a startling and incisive novel from a brilliant young writer, uniquely placed to bear witness to some of the most urgent questions of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Taseer's memoir, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, or his previous novel, The Temple-Goers, may be disappointed to find a shocking amount of retread in his latest. It seems less a novel than four loose vignettes from a life split between India and Pakistan, with a postcolonial emphasis on how industrial modernization has isolated the Westernized bourgeoisie from a sometimes resentful underclass. The first episode offers a snapshot from the Delhi childhood of Rehan Tabassum; the second introduces his stepfather, the seething "man of the times" industrialist Amit Sethia; while in the third section, Rehan narrates the investigation of a burglary at the Sethias' estate in which everyone is a suspect. The book's last and strongest part finds the privileged Rehan adjusting to life in the intrigue-ridden household of his estranged Pakistani birth father, powerless to control the ingrained scandalous class fissures in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. There are incisive depictions of believers entwined with moguls beholden to American interests, but overall, while the prose has a hypnotic old-fashioned fluidity, there is a distinctly deleted-scenes feel, leaving what ought to be the most stirring characters blank and the most revealing details unarticulated.
