Other Names for Love: ‘Exceptional’ Sunjeev Sahota

The summer’s unmissable literary debut, for fans of Damon Galgut, Brandon Taylor and Hisham Matar

On the train from Karachi, as dusk begins to fall, Fahad’s dreams of his summer in London are fading. He is headed to Abad, the family’s feudal estate, where his father intends to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family — to make him a man.

Instead, over the course of one shimmering, indolent season, Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and by the people he meets: those who revere and revile his father; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and Ali, a teenager like him, whose presence threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Other Names for Love is a truly exceptional novel: a luminous tale of memory and desire, inheritance and love, and the search for a sense of home. Written with urgency and unusual beauty, it marks the arrival of a stunning new voice in fiction.