Noon
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Set over twenty years of convulsive change, Noon is the story of Rehan Tabassum, a young man whose heart is split across two cultures’ troubled divide.
Throughout his young life, Rehan has been aware of his father’s absence. The journey to find him is long and difficult, from the glitter of his mother’s New Delhi to the Pakistan of her former lover, the man Rehan has never known. Through lands of sudden wealth and hidden violence, in a toxic atmosphere of blackmail and moral danger, he travels towards the centre of a dark and shifting world. But his imagined destination is simply another beginning . . .
‘As the political and personal undergo seismic shifts, Taseer grapples with new ways of telling stories. In both form and content, he conveys with great acuity what happens when the ground beneath our feet is shaken to its core’ Independent
‘An engrossing and gifted writer’ GQ
‘Imbued with a feel of latent menace, Noon explores a morally unedifying world of power, corruption, violence and complicity’ Guardian
‘Gripping’ Sunday 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.
