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W. W. Norton & Company
November 2009
On Sale: November 16, 2009
256 pages
ISBN: 0393337200
EAN: 9780393337204
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction: “The
rural rootedness and gentle humour of R.K. Narayan with the
literary sophistication and stylishness of Jhumpa
Lahiri.”—Financial Times Passing from the mannered drawing
rooms of Pakistan’s cities to the harsh mud villages beyond,
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s linked stories describe the interwoven
lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and
managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have
lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Joyce’s Dubliners
and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, these stories
comprehensively illuminate a world, describing members of
parliament and farm workers, Islamabad society girls and
desperate servant women. A hard-driven politician at the
height of his powers falls critically ill and seeks to
perpetuate his legacy; a girl from a declining Lahori family
becomes a wealthy relative’s mistress, thinking there will
be no cost; an electrician confronts a violent assailant in
order to protect his most valuable possession; a maidservant
who advances herself through sexual favors unexpectedly
falls in love. Together the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders make
up a vivid portrait of feudal Pakistan, describing the
advantages and constraints of social station, the
dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. Refined,
sensuous, by turn humorous, elegiac, and tragic, Mueenuddin
evokes the complexities of the Pakistani feudal order as it
is undermined and transformed.
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