RaveThe Boston GlobeThe eight short stories of Daniyal Mueenuddin's enchanting debut are dreamlike, illuminating contemporary Pakistan's societal contradictions in prose as clear and serene as the contradictions themselves are subtle and tumultuous. Pakistan emerges as a place and a people ensnared by tensions of class and ancestry, wealth and poverty, virtue and vice, urban cosmopolitanism and rural provincialism. It writhes between its vanishing parochial past and its emerging multicultural future, neither a refuge in the menagerie of the present … As if to reflect this cultural blurring of boundaries, the stories are intertwined, with recurring characters and intersecting plots that suggest a literary blurring of boundaries. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is neither a story collection nor a novel. It is a literary weave, much like its author and his swirling landscapes are cultural weaves.
