Other Names for Love opens on a night train across the desert. Sixteen-year-old Fahad is travelling with his father Rafik to the family’s farmlands, tamed from the jungle and now the source of their wealth and power. Fahad doesn’t want to be there: he and the older man are not close; he is supposed to be in London with his mother, going to galleries and the theatre, and not to the end of the world.

But when he falls in love with a boy from the next village, Fahad’s summer under duress becomes an experience that will shape the rest of his life.This is a brilliant, intense, often heart-rending novel exploring unspoken desire and its consequences for a family and for a society run for and by men. Masterfully compressed, almost hallucinatory in its atmosphere, it is about exile, return, and memory; and about what it means to be a father and a son.