Other Names for Love

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.