For you short attention span folks, this is a beautiful book. Get it, read it. For the rest of you, think Pakistan. Think fiction, but the kind of fiction that immediately makes you feel like you are standing in the scene. And let me say this, I typically don’t like short stories, but these short stories are linked. “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” is Daniyal Mueenuddin’s masterpiece of landowners, staff, and workers in a feudal farm system outside Lahore. This book is about having it all and having nothing. It’s about city versus country. Wealth vs poverty and what slips away when cultures are overrun by modernity.
This book was effortless.
My wife found this in a free library. I needed a fictional break, so I pounced. The next day my wife said, “Hey, when you are done I want to read that.” “I’m done,” I replied. “No, I meant that book I just found,” she said. “Yep, I finished” I said. It was that easy, which means it’s written that well. Pakistan is a place I will visit some day. I’ve been thinking about it for decades, but have never had the chance to book that ticket. Reading this has increased my sense of urgency.