Found in Lutry port book box. A Pakistani family in England. Praise from Colm Toibin on front cover. It's quite thick and the print is small, and I'm a bit put off by seeing it written in the present tense - but the author is very handsome.

I'm progressing very slowly with this - for a start, the text is quite small and dense, and then, I'm having problems with the characters, whose names are not easily memorable, all of them being very unfamiliar. After three reading sessions I was surprised to see I was only at page 40. Also, I was confused about whether we were in UK or in Pakistan (it is a Pakistani community in England, but not much of a community as they are intolerant of each other's religions). However, the imagery and descriptions are often beautiful even though there are far too many similes and metaphors - sometimes three in one sentence. I loved the story about the butterflies.
I think I'll have to write down a list of the characters and how they are related to each other; it is quite complicated.

Halfway through, and I'm giving up on this. I can no longer fight my way through the morass of similes. Background blurb says "a language that is arrestingly poetic", "gorgeously written", "a trail of bewitching images", "a dense, dark tapestry".
Well, I would have put my editor's red pencil through half of every sentence.
I want to know what happened to the disappeared couple, Jugnu and Chanda, but the narrative is not advancing at all.
Here are some passages, taken at random:

The typewriter - the keys arranged in rows one above another always reminding Shamas of faces in a school photograph.
Each street has become a row of books on a shelf.
Moths and butterflies, the visual equivalent of a nightingale's vibrant note, te long pin impaling each body reminiscent of the shaft that passes vertically through the wooden horse of a carousel.
Naan bread shaped like ballet slippers, poppy seeds that were coarser than sand grains but still managed to shift like a dune whenthe jar was tilted, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, edible petals of courgette flowers packed inside the buds like amber scarves in green rucksacks, chili seeds that were volts of electricity, the peppers whose stalks were hooked like umbrella handles, butter to be diced into cubes reluctant to separate, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother's belly.
That last sentence takes the biscuit - seven similes.

The problem is, when you start noticing them, you can't stop looking for them, and the pleasure of reading is lost.

Apart from this imagery, which is mostly pleasant (maybe apart from the melting butter that's like the trail of a snail), the attitudes and prejudice of some of the characters is hard to bear. I was under the illusion that people of different religions tolerated each other, as in, say, Mauritius, but no, there is too much hatred and bitterness among these Pakistanis, perhaps exacerbated by their environment in England?

So I will never know what happened to Jugnu.
And I have filled the pages with pink highlighter (something I NEVER do) so am not sure what to do with the book. Maybe I'll hold on to it for the day when I have read through my entire Mount TBR.

I really tried to read the rest of it, and took someone's advice and read the last chapter, but I was none the wiser - just a book that was not for me. So I have left it on the shelf in the free library at the bus stop. With apologies for all the pink highlighting.