Other Names for Love - Paperback

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by Taymour Soomro (Author)

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 rural estate in up-country 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 Ali's 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 back to Abad. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and longing, set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.

Author Biography

Taymour Soomro is a British Pakistani writer. He studied law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School. He has worked as a corporate solicitor in London and Milan, a lecturer at a university in Karachi, an agricultural estate manager in rural Sindh, and a publicist for a luxury fashion brand in London. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Southern Review. He has published a textbook on law with Oxford University Press; has written extensively for the Pakistani news media; and is the coeditor, with Deepa Anappara, of a creative writing handbook on fiction, race, and culture. Other Names for Love is his debut novel.

Number of Pages: 256

Dimensions: 0.79 x 7.87 x 4.8 IN

Publication Date: July 11, 2023