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Other Names for Love

The unmissable literary novel about a life-changing summer in Pakistan

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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. 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.

© Taymour Soomro 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

 Coming of Age Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural World Literature

Critic reviews

A beautiful novel on the desire to leave and the hope to remain, the need to find oneself among one's people and away from them (HISHAM MATAR, author of The Return)
An exceptional novel about fathers and sons, desire and love, and the long reach of the past (SUNJEEV SAHOTA, author of China Room)
Such a deftly told and evocative story of duty, masculinity and desire (KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Home Fire)
A twenty-first century variation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons... Taymour Soomro is a thrilling new addition to international literature (YIYUN LI, author of Must I Go)
This haunted, haunting novel is about the cruelties we commit in our search for freedom and the bonds from which we can never be free. Taymour Soomro's piercing insight is that both the freedom and the bonds are constituent of love (Garth Greenwell, author of CLEANNESS and WHAT BELONGS TO YOU)
A powerful, moving novel and an impressive debut (MOHSIN HAMID, author of Exit West)
Spell-binding, like a song overheard in the night, one you follow like a map to the singer. Other Names For Love feels both new and ancient... A masterful debut (ALEXANDER CHEE, author of Queen of the Night)
An elegant and affecting story about love... Other Names for Love probes the mystery of who we are by looking at the places (our homelands and wherever we flee to) and people (our parents and lovers) that forge us (RUMAAN ALAM, author of Leave the World Behind)
A compact book bursting with emotion, it leaves you eager for whatever this already vastly accomplished author will do next
[Soomro's] insights - into class, power, masculinity, desire, shame and filial duty - are fresh and nuanced... [he] is thrillingly attuned to the hum and growl of his characters' moods... Other Names for Love announces an author of great promise
All stars
Most relevant
Set in rural Punjab it tells the story of Fahad who is sent to UK to study and returna a stranger to his own country. His strained relationship with his parents and himself. I found the writing clumsy and the narrator's voice irritating
Which spoiled the narrative. The characters don't seem fully formed leaving the reader distanced from them and the story.

Feudalism vs industrialism

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Having read some reviews, I was looking forward to this book. However it has proved to be very disappointing. I had problems following the story and it seemed very confused. It was difficult to empathise with any of the characters. I think the reader did his best, but the material is hard to work with.

Disappointing

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