Readers and critics have compared the acclaimed Urdu writer Naiyer Masud to Kafka, Borges and Murakami. But it is best to speak of his style as pure Masud, for no other writer has rendered a fictional world quite like that of this master storyteller. His prose is spare and seductive and his stories have a shimmering, elusive quality. Although individually perfectly formed and complete, yet each story appears to have no beginning or end, drawing the reader into a seamless narrative structure. The coming of age of a young boy who looks for domains of fear and desire in the houses he inspects, a man’s life shaped by his father’s dreams and his mother’s devotion, a walk down memory lane to fulfill a mother’s dying wish, a beautiful girl with deformed feet–the reader begins to inhabit a world where illusions are as stark as day, and experience Masud’s writing in a metaphysical, almost Sufi-like, sense.
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