Noon

Noon

by Aatish Taseer (Author)

Synopsis

Set over two decades of convulsive change, Noon is the moving story of Rehan Tabassum, a young man whose heart is split across two cultures' troubled divide.

Rehan's mother and her new husband are the embodiment of a dazzling, emergent India. Yet as the old, muted order of dust and shortages recedes, Rehan finds himself unmoored. With his father still a powerful shadow across the border in Pakistan, Rehan's journey begins: through lands of sudden wealth and hidden violence, in an atmosphere of political quicksand and moral danger, towards the centre of a dark, shifting world.

Noon is a startling and incisive novel from a brilliant young writer, uniquely placed to bear witness to some of the most urgent questions of our times.

Praise for The Temple Goers

`Naipaul's praise is rare enough to be notable; and Taseer lives up to it . . . among the sharpest and best-written fictions about contemporary India' Independent

`A coolly accomplished, pulsating account of modern-day Delhi' Guardian

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Publisher: Picador
Published: 01 Jul 2011

ISBN 10: 0330540416
ISBN 13: 9780330540414

Media Reviews
Combining a heady cocktail of theft, blackmail and dysfunctional family relations with a touch of the Kafkaesque, this is a powerfully written and deeply thoughtful work. --Anna Scott, The Guardian A meditative, occasionally jolting novel by Aatish Taseer, the 31-year-old son of the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer . . . [A] blackmail plotline provides the novel with its brutal climax--and deepens the perception that Pakistan is both decadent and abnegating, irrevocably Westernized and violently closed off. The novel's smart coda . . . does nothing to reconcile or rationalize these contradictions. No sense trying to do so, seems to be the message of this intelligent, unsettling novel--a theme only a fiction writer could express in such a satisfactory way. --Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast Naipaul's praise is rare enough to be notable; and Taseer lives up to it . . . Among the sharpest and best-written fictions about . . . contemporary India. -- The Independent [A] tangle of politics, murder, bribery and betrayal . . . Gripping. -- The Observer Noon's careful yet nimble prose captures the visceral quality of this world in decline through a keenly critical and coldly detached lens . . . Moral corruption, greed, and violence are not glamorized or sensationalized; they are recursive facts of life, eternally returning as Nietzsche would've guessed, and modern day Pakistan is not immune . . . It pops with the verve of a great detective story, filled with suspense and scandal, but also empathy and even meta-fiction. --Stephen Spencer, Electric Literature
Author Bio
Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009), The Temple-Goers (2010), which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon (2011). He lives between London and Delhi.