This Other Salt

عن الكتاب

Each story, remarkable in both expansiveness and precision, sings with heartbreak, intelligence and elegy. A stuning collection. Acclained 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 1992. In his 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 this other salt a writer, torn between two loves looks for his lost words in the gap between memory, mourning and desire; 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 the blue direction a teenaged booy's life uncannily begins to resemble the role he plays in a school operetta. Combining satire, legend, poetry, history and memoir, the linked stories of this other salt reveal an outhor of uncommon talent at the height of his craft.