Noon

‘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

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

Throughout his young life, Rehan has been aware of his father’s absence. The journey to find him is long and difficult, from the glitter of his mother’s New Delhi to the Pakistan of her former lover, the man Rehan has never known. Through lands of sudden wealth and hidden violence, in a toxic atmosphere of blackmail and moral danger, he travels towards the centre of a dark and shifting world. But his imagined destination is simply another beginning . . .

‘As the political and personal undergo seismic shifts, Taseer grapples with new ways of telling stories. In both form and content, he conveys with great acuity what happens when the ground beneath our feet is shaken to its core’ Independent

‘An engrossing and gifted writer’ GQ

‘Imbued with a feel of latent menace, Noon explores a morally unedifying world of power, corruption, violence and complicity’ Guardian

‘Gripping’ Sunday Times