Book Review: Other Names for Love

Posted December 17, 2022 by geograph in adult, contemporary, historical, queer, review / 0 Comments

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Book Review: Other Names for LoveOther Names for Love by Taymour Soomro
on July 12, 2022
Genres: Fiction / Coming of Age, Fiction / LGBTQ+ / Gay, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / World Literature / Pakistan
Pages: 256
Format: ARC, Audiobook, eBook
Source: Netgalley

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.

This was heartbreaking and wild and intense and really slow at times and taking place in two different places and times and honestly, a lot going on. Great narration; I read this on audiobook. A lot of the writing feels very surreal or dreamlike, especially in the first half, but the second half feels more sharper and feels more like it’s about Relationships. It’s relatively short, coming in at 256 pages, and I wish the second half was longer and the first half was a little shorter. I think this author is going to go on to write books that I will like a lot more in the future, so, four stars.

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