Aug
4
12:00am
Skylit: Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro, with Jonathan Parks-Ramage
By Skylight Books
Other Names for Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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.
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 co-editor, with Deepa Anappara, of a creative writing handbook on fiction, race and culture.
Jonathan Parks-Ramage is a Los Angeles based novelist, screenwriter and journalist. His critically acclaimed debut novel, YES, DADDY, was named as one of the best queer books of 2021 by Entertainment Weekly, NBC News, The Advocate, Bustle, Lambda Literary, Goodreads, and more. Amazon Studios is currently adapting the book for television. His writing has been widely published in such outlets as VICE, Slate, OUT Magazine, W Magazine, Lit Hub, Atlas Obscura, Elle, Electric Literature and more. He is also an alumnus of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Praise for Other Names for Love -
“A twenty-first century variation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Other Names for Love explores the age-old dilemma faced by all those whose childhood is defined, and whose future is decreed, by tradition: how to carve a space for one’s innermost self, how to love without turning oneself into love’s sacrifice, how to be courageous without losing one’s tenderness. A keen-eyed observer and a sensitive storyteller, Taymour Soomro is a thrilling new addition to international literature.” —Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End and Must I Go
“An exceptional novel about fathers and sons, desire and love, and the long reach of the past. It’s a relief to encounter writing this beautifully wrought, to enter a world this meticulously realized, and to read a novel so bold, so committed.” —Sunjeev Sahota, author of The Year of the Runaways and China Room
“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
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