In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

In this beautiful and assured collection, Daniyal Mueenuddin works and reworks the eternal themes of life, love and death. His control never wavers - neither does his compassion.

The stories are loosely linked, describing the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family, headed by the elderly patriarch KK Harouni. Benevolent and rich, Harouni employs a great many staff and servants to run his households and his huge farming operation; some of them are loyal, others exploit him. Put crudely, half the stories are about life 'below stairs', the other half about the Harouni family and its extended members, but this is to oversimplify their sublety and reach.

Servants' tales focus on the precarious position of poorer women in contemporary Pakistani society - their desperate need to make strategic alliances with men, their ultimate dependence upon them. Sometimes these relationships are based on love, sometimes love grows from something more mercenary. Sometimes neither happens, but for as long as these partnerships last, women have security (and, in the confined world of the relationship or the household, a little power). However, as soon as the relationships end - usually as a result of illness or death - the women are cut off, cast out.

Relationship struggles of a different kind affect the well-off members of the Harouni family. In 'Our Lady of Paris', good-natured Sohail Harouni takes his American girlfriend (they met at Yale) to Paris for Christmas and New Year. His mother - who 'knew everyone of a certain class in Karachi, went to dinners and to the polo and to all the fashionable weddings' - rents an apartment in Paris at the same time, so that she and her husband can meet Helen. In a series of quite beautifully described encounters, Sohail's mother and Helen come to an arrangement that is as brutal as it is compassionate.

Mueenuddin's writing has a cool ambiguity about it that nevertheless sets the pulse racing. He doesn't judge his characters, he simply and very precisely tells. There is an enormous dignity to these stories - it is a stunning achievement and a hugely impressive debut.