Other Names for Love
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A charged, hypnotic debut novel about a boy’s life-changing summer in rural Pakistan: a story of fathers, sons, and the consequences of desire.
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 in upcountry, Pakistan. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Soomro's nuanced debut contends with themes of sexuality and masculinity in Pakistan. Fahad, 16, reluctantly travels by train with his father, Rafik, to their rural estate in Abad. Rafik hopes to introduce the theater-inclined Fahad to an appropriate friend who can help him become "a man." Ali, a tough, local boy, initially intimidates Fahad, but soon captures his heart, the heat and wildness of the countryside mirroring Fahad's desire. In chapters from Rafik's points of view, Soomro delves into his struggle to cultivate his jungle property into farmland and his ruthless determination to maintain power by bribing officials and coercing his workers into building an audacious dam. Decades later, in what seems to be the present day, Fahad is a successful writer living an openly gay life in London when his comfortable existence is upended by a call from his mother claiming his parents are about to lose their house in Karachi. Fahad returns to Pakistan and discovers Rafik has squandered his money and is losing his memory. Together they travel back to Abad, and Fahad, brimming with nostalgia for Ali, reckons with the passage of time. In sharp prose, Soomro brings clarity and emotional heft to Fahad's wistfulness ("the Ali he was looking for was long gone... but still he kept looking"). This author is one to watch.
