A stunning collection. Each story, remarkable in both expansiveness and precision, sings with heartbreaks, intelligence and elegy. Acclaimed both in Pakistan and in Britain, Aamer Hussein’s first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun, was chosen by Shena Mackay as one of her Books of the year in 1993. In this long awaited second collection – which includes the experimental sequence ‘Skies’ – he continues and deepens his oblique, subversive portrayal of the preoccupations of our time: betrayal, bereavement, exile, belonging and the writer’s role. In ‘The Blue Direction’ a teenaged boy’s life uncannily begins to resemble the role he plays in a school operetta; in ‘The Lost Cantos of the Silken Tiger’ a poet revenges herself on her faithless lover by turning their romance into a biblical legend; and in ‘This other Salt’ a writer, torn between two loves, looks for his lost worlds in the gap between memory, mourning and desire. Combining satire, legend, poetry, history and memoir, the linked stories of the The Blue Direction reveal an author of uncommon talent at the height of his craft.
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