It is beautifully related in simple, direct language which often achieves its effect by its absences. A dazzling instance of this is the title itself, which doesn’t appear as a phrase anywhere in the story and thereby alerts the reader to other, untold stories.

‘Our Lady Of Paris’ takes place in France, where Harouni’s nephew, Sohail, spends Christmas with Helen, his girlfriend from Yale. The difficulty here is not that love will be violently sundered by forces beyond the protagonists’ control, for they appear rich and free enough to do anything. Their love is touchingly evoked, but it remains doubtful whether Helen could manage in Pakistan. This East-West culture divide also looks set to make permanent damage between the rich but promising couple in ‘Lily’. The collection finishes with the Chekhovian ‘A Spoiled Man’. It is exquisite, not least for the delicate answer it provides to a question left carefully open in an earlier story.

Since the simplicity of these stories is of course supremely artful, it is surprising to find a chunk of James Merrill lumbering in the middle. Yet, quoted by the only character who might plausibly have it by heart (Sohail), it does not jar because its closing couplet (‘…the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent’) is profoundly reflected in the tensions between love, events, pain and necessity revealed in this wonderful book. Mueenuddin has sophisticated language and a powerful range of cultural references at his disposal, and a rare sensibility.

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