Other Names for Love

Sixteen-year-old Fahad is taken by his father, Rafik, from the comforts of Karachi to Abad, the family's feudal estate in rural upcountry Pakistan. Rafik, a powerful and domineering man, hopes the land will harden his sensitive son and teach him about duty, family, and power, and he enlists a local teenager, Ali, in the project.

Over one long, sweltering season, the plan goes awry as an intense attraction grows between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself drawn into the wildness of the place and its people, including a cousin who lives apart with the man he calls his manager, and above all Ali, whose presence threatens to expose everything Fahad would rather keep hidden.

Years later, settled abroad, Fahad is summoned home by his mother and returns to face the father, the land, and the memories he left behind, finding the once-tyrannical Rafik diminished by dementia as his own mind floods with the past.

Spare and charged, the novel moves between that distant summer and the present to explore masculinity, inheritance, and forbidden desire against the backdrop of Pakistan's turbulent history, asking what is passed between fathers and sons and what is buried to survive.