Other Names for Love

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now ${{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

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

Critics Review

  • 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

More from the same

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.