It’s really rare that I don’t manage to finish a book, and I’m sad to have eventually put this down for the foreseeable. Perhaps I will come back to it one day.

The premise of this is amazing - the exploration of a turbulent and complex father-son relationship in rural Afghanistan - and I had such high hopes for this. However, I found the execution of this book really frustrating. Perhaps it’s because I was reading it on kindle, but the abrupt changes between perspectives of father and son were jarring and did not feel smoothly executed. I felt like I was struggling to follow the narrative thread and dialogue as it was, without these abrupt changes in perspective.

In the second half of the book, when the time suddenly jumped forward by several years, I tried to persist but eventually had to call it a day. I just don’t think this one was for me!

This is a story about place, love, and societal expectations: Fahad is discovering his sexuality, and it doesn't fit with his father's conservative expectations of his son in Pakistan. The story shifts between Pakistan, and the freer easier living Fahad is able to experience in London.

When Fahad is called home, his father is older and senile, and the unwinding of the family history becomes a journey for them both.

I enjoyed the story, the locations are much a place as the characters.

"Other Names for Love" is a beautifully written debut novel that explores the complexities of love, loss, and identity. The story follows the journey of Zaki, a young man who is struggling to come to terms with the death of his father and his own feelings of displacement as a Pakistani-American.

One of the things that struck me about this book is the way that the author weaves together multiple storylines and themes to create a rich and multifaceted narrative. Alongside Zaki's personal journey, the book also delves into issues of race, religion, and cultural identity, and the characters are all complex and fully realized.

The writing in "Other Names for Love" is both lyrical and introspective. Soomro has a gift for language, and his descriptions of both the inner and outer worlds of his characters are vivid and evocative. The book is also filled with subtle but poignant observations about the human experience, and I found myself underlining passages throughout.

Perhaps the biggest strength of "Other Names for Love" is the emotional depth of the story. Zaki's journey is one that many readers will be able to relate to, and the book does an excellent job of capturing the conflicting emotions of grief, love, and self-discovery. There were several moments in the book that left me with a lump in my throat, and I found myself thinking about the story long after I had finished reading.

Overall, "Other Names for Love" is a stunning debut novel that announces Taymour Soomro as a writer to watch. The book is both thoughtful and affecting, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys literary fiction that explores the complexities of the human experience.

Taymour Soomro’s debut novel, Other Names for Love, explores how much your life is determined and affected by where and to whom you’re born, and how the legacy of this beginning can haunt your thoughts for the rest of your life. The novel’s themes are complex; shame and pride, memory and ego, politics and love are all brought to the forefront during the story’s ebbs and flows. The novel effectively challenges ideas of good and bad, of a clear villain, with the narrative ensuring that the reader feels compassion for the flawed characters who inhabit it.

This rather enjoyable novel is harder to describe than it is to read, so I’m not going to describe it!
I think at the heart of this is the need of the main character to be accepted for who he is: his personality, his sexuality, his life choices. He doesn’t want to carry on with the family businesses of either farming or politics, and he likes his life in London. This is only reinforced for him when he needs to go back to see his ailing father.

The language is evocative of the places and times, especially when Fahad is living in the countryside. It’s a place that’s barely contained - the jungle wants to reclaim the farmland, much like Fahad wanting to claim his own life.

You can feel how repressed Fahad is by cultural and familial expectations, as much as the oppressive heat seems to smother him as well.

I enjoyed this melancholy read, and look forward to seeing what the author writes next.

An unusual story about India, told from the viewpoint of an Anglicised son visiting his feudal / local politician father, who hopes he will inherit. His boredom and awkward outsider sensation are viscerally portrayed, and the simmering tension with the local boy assigned to help him is tangible. For all this, I found the first section almost claustrophobic (testament to the effective writing!) and was relieved and refreshed with the final section of the book which leaped into the future, as I was pleased to find the son had lived his own authentic life, despite his troubled memories of this summer in India and the impact these have on the present - without this I think the plot would have felt depressing and perhaps a bit cliched from an LGBTQ POV. It took me a while to get into this novel but by the end I found it a worthwhile story and a unique insight into Indian family hierarchies, dynasties and local class tensions, with a sensitive LGBTQ thread.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC to review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the storytelling, narrative voice, and the characters felt so real and full.

Brilliant read.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

This was a good read - super easy and flowed so nicely. I raced through it which is always a good sign!

A really intriguing and sensitive insight into male relationships - familial, platonic and romantic. Gorgeously written, and firmly literary.

A beautiful written story, the style was really the highlights. This book is really about all different kinds of relationships, particularly between the men of it - paternal and familial, friendship and romantic. How they weave among each other to create complications, especially when it comes to matters of duty. I found it an interesting read but was surprised that it didn't emotionally hit me more, this kind of story usually would. But it's one I'd recommend to the people in my life because there's a lot to love and respect here.

A powerful, engrossing start but then drifted into a disjointed story over the following decades.

Well-crafted at sentence level but ‘the whole’ did not work for me.

Other Names for Love is a story about fathers and sons, and the complexities of their relationships. It's also a queer coming-of-age story and an insight into life in Pakistan.

Fahad is sixteen, and living in London - he's close to his mother and has a distant, wary relationship with her father, Rafik. Rafik takes Fahad to Pakistan hoping to make him a man - Rafik is a powerful man in Pakistan and, though Fahad resists the visit, it proves to be an eye-opening summer for him. The novel's second section sees Fahad return to Pakistan, haunted by old ghosts.

Sadly, this was a DNF shortly after the halfway point for me. The novel is beautifully written - the prose is tender, descriptive and dreamy but ultimately I struggled to connect at all to the plot, or the characters. Without either of those, it's hard to find something enjoyable or worthy to cling onto in a novel - for me anyway, prose will only get you so far.

I found myself frustrated and confused by the changing points of view as well as the time jumps - even a date at the top of each section would have made things far easier. As another review points out, this feels like several novels shoved into one, and though the prose is admittedly gorgeous and the descriptions of rural Pakistan vivid and arresting, it wasn't enough to keep me interested in this one.

Beautifully written. Definitely a very evocative work, and the relationships between characters were beautifully portrayed. What a lovely writer to have discovered. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Vintage for this opportunity!

This one is hard to review. On one level, it was a really beautifully written book; some of the imagery and language was just unfathomably rich, and the sense of place was so authentic that it really did feel like the next best thing to being there. The atmosphere is intense and the sense of something building was tangible; I read the whole thing in two sittings, only broken up by the necessity of capitalism etc etc. As an exploration of a certain type of father and a certain type of son, it's extraordinary. Some reviewers have complained that the split narrative perspective was frustrating because they found Fahad's POV much more interesting than Rafik. I disagree wholeheartedly. I found Rafik to be by far the more interesting protagonist. His myopic view of what makes a man and his complete refusal to look beyond what's directly in front of him are fascinating; it's always clear that other things are occurring in the background and around his peripheral vision, but he's so hyper-focused on himself and his plans that he just doesn't see it. The sense of the world around him is only ever sketched out by its absence, and it's brilliantly conveyed. Of all the characters, he felt the most three dimensional.

It was let down for me by what seemed like an attempt at establishing itself too solidly as Very Literary Fiction. The dialogue is deliberately stilted - one character will be having one conversation, and their conversation partner is having another entirely, for about 70% of the book - and the characterisation is very flat, largely due to the huge time jump, which I don't think was handled particularly deftly. All characters are completely different people before and after, and we don't get a sense of their lives in the decades between. The repercussions of what happens in the first half aren't really large enough to sustain the second half. It's never explicitly stated what exactly DOES happen, so it doesn't feel overly satisfying when the narrative comes to an end and we're still not completely certain what split the family apart in the first place; it loses its emotional catharsis. The great sense of foreboding doesn't ever really mature into anything actually happening, which feels like a great shame.

Still, a book that shows an awful lot of promise; if Soomro's next novel manages to make the structure even half as good as his (excellent) prose, it'll be outstanding.

Amazing writing style or amazing plot - which would you pick? I've come to realise that I'd much rather read a beautifully written story, than a gripping storyline. Other Names for Love by Taymoor Soomro reads like poetry. I was transported to rural Pakistan. I could see the golden fields, smell the foods, admire the outfits… I could also see the droughts caused by the climate crisis and the depletion of natural resources; the competitiveness between various farmers and landowners; classism, corruption and politics.

At a more personal level, this is a story of a son and his father who does not listen, who had his own childhood issues. Homophobia, mental health, emigration - all are tackled within the pages of this beautiful book. Is this autofiction? Not really, but the author did say he wanted to remember his grandfather, who was a farmer and taught him some of the techniques.

This was a sad, evocative book. At times confusing, and the ending was not as satisfying as I would have liked. The pace is slow, and I'm not sure we needed the father's perspective, as his narrowmindedness and stubbornness was jarring; his thoughts repetitive and frustrating. I won't reveal too much about what actually happens. It is definitely worth reading if you like character-driven stories.

Thank you @NetGalley @penguinrandomhouse and @vintagebooks for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This novel follows a boy named Fahad as he navigates an early summer with his father at their family’s large farm estate in rural Pakistan. Fahad’s father is a politician and landowner who others look to as a leader but the relationship between father and son is fractious, tense; they don’t seem to know each other well and struggle to meet in the middle. Fahad has spent more time in London than this farm where his family have been for generations and doesn’t speak the local language - he makes a friend of a local boy who is assigned as a guide of sorts but this blossoms into a romance that both panics and excites the young boy. Later, we follow Fahad on a journey back to the farmland more than twenty years later, after he’s built a very different life for himself in England, having self-exiled himself in the intervening years. But his father is growing old and confused and they take a journey back together which brings their relationship back into focus again. This novel is interesting in terms of its focuses on self-discovery and personal relationships, but it didn’t resonate much with me personally - the final 10% of the book was the most interesting but overall this was a slow read for me and took me a long time to get there - I’ve come away a bit ambivalent, I suppose.

My thanks to #NetGalley and Vintage for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a tender and carefully written story about a young boy forced to spend a summer with this distant father in rural Pakistan, in the hopes that it will toughen him up and prepare him to help run the family estate.
Overall, it was definitely a solid debut, and some of the sentences drew me in. The descriptions of nature and land being particularly beautiful.

The best parts of the novel were definitely the, aforementioned, tender scenes in which some of the characters interacted with one another. It is very much a story about fathers and sons, and just family in general. I loved the scenes between Fahad and his father, Rafik. Rafik shares some memories with his son, and is surprised by the fact that these memories are suddenly coming back to him, as well as the urge to speak about them. Memories haunt all of the characters, and Soomro writes these flashbacks in lovely, dreamlike prose.

The aspect that did not quite work for me was the fact that the part of the novel set during Fahad's "life-changing" teenage years felt quite short. The later parts of the book, which I will not spoil, were definitely quite emotional. Soomro tackled child/parent relationships beautifully, and really captured the idea of looking at your parents in a different way once you have grown older. Compared to this, the first part seemed slightly less convincing. I would have loved some more exploration of the relationship between Fahad and Ali.

However, I have very little to complain about. This story really demanded my attention. I will definitely keep an eye out for whatever Soomro publishes in the future!

Thank you very much for the review copy.

This debut novel, published earlier this month, has been touted as one that might feature on prize lists, so before today’s Booker Prize longlist announcement, here’s my review.

Billed as a story about a boy’s life-changing summer in rural Pakistan, Other Names For Love is really more a story of fathers and sons. Actually, I would say the novel is to fathers and sons what Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi was to mothers and daughters - difficult filial relationships, dementia, parental expectations and family duty. I wasn’t a fan of Burnt Sugar but I did quite like this one.

Sixteen year old Karachi native Fahad is hoping to spend a summer in London with his mother, dining out and going to the theatre, but his father Rafik, a landowner and powerful politician, has other ideas.

Rafik takes Fahad to the family farm in Abad in rural Pakistan to “make a man” of his sensitive son. Fahad is guided by local boy Ali, for whom he develops feelings.

Years later, Fahad returns to Pakistan to assist his mother when his father has brought the family to the brink of financial ruin through his reckless pursuit of political power. Vowing to help his mother by ensuring the sale of the farm in Abad, Fahad has conflicting emotions on his return there, recalling his coming-of-age summer.

Beautifully descriptive, lyrical, literary prose and oblique storytelling lend this book a slightly dreamy quality, meaning some will love it but others will be frustrated or bored by it. For me, I’m on the fence.

I enjoyed the writing to a point, but felt as though it obscured what was a very decent story and rendered interesting characters impenetrable. The book skimmed over the entire middle period of Fahad’s life which just it didn’t sit right with me.

In short, a beautifully written debut but not without its shortcomings from a reader’s perspective. 3/5⭐️

*Many thanks to the publisher @vintagebooks @penguinrandomhouse who contacted me in May and provided me with an eARC via @netgalley. As always, this is an honest review.*

Thank you to the publisher for inviting me to review this title.

It was refreshing to read about a queer experience from a culture that's so different from my own. However, there is still much here that is so universally human that almost anyone can relate to Fahad, like the complex layers of your identity, the push and pull between you and your parents (they love you, and they're disappointed in you, and they're proud of you, and, and...), as well as the overwhelming feeling of otherness that many queer people live with, even after they move somewhere more accepting (you're too gay, or too foreign, or too whatever wherever you go). <i>Other Names for Love</i> really digs deep into all these gray areas of our relationships, and isn't afraid to leave questions unanswered. Relationships often don't have neat story arcs or easy conclusions, and it was both comforting and frustrating to relate to Fahad's experiences with his family and friends.

We follow Fahad first as a teenager in Pakistan and then meet him again as an adult in England. I liked that young Fahad and adult Fahad have distinctive voices, but I have to admit that I started to enjoy the book in earnest when we got to adult Fahad's experiences. I think I might have connected to teenage Fahad better if the story had started at an earlier point in time, with us experiencing with him the initial disappointment that sets the story in motion.

In addition to Fahad, we get to see events from his father Rafik's perspective. I get the symmetry there - hearing from a father and a son - but I would have preferred to also read some chapters from Fahad's mother's perspective, as well as his boyfriend's.