Four Dervishes

“So vivid are these stories that one can imagine Rind, sitting on a fine stool, surrounded by hundreds of audience as he narrates these stories, commanding all the emotions of surprise, shock and jaw-dropping feelings that these stories effortlessly evoke.”

“Hammad Rind’s story lures you in with depictions of inter-gender injustice, disparate yet relatable. His manner of social commentary helps underline that we – that is to say, contemporary global society – have not fixed the same mistakes in our supposed utopia. This ripples through our own understanding and leaves us with as many questions as we started with.”

“The Four Dervishes is a fantastical novel, filled with an array of rich linguistic, poetic, and cultural gems from various parts of the world, and one that will make you laugh, and yet also reflect, which is in my opinion, the best combination.”

“Invokes the magic of storytelling as a temporary diversion from the humdrum of daily existence and an escape into another time and place through the lives of others … Four Dervishes is testimony to his passion for language and world literature and evokes not just Eastern classics of the genre such as One Thousand and One Nights but also Chaucerian tale-telling.”

“Four Dervishes’s central topic is an unapologetic exploration of storytelling itself … In a time when the dominant form of the novel rejects all but the mildly improbable in the name of realism, this work embraces the exceptional. Earthquakes bring lovers together, wars are waged against barbers and men are turned into trees. It is a refreshing celebration of the fantastical, and is unburdened with a need to rationalise or justify that which breaks the boundaries of standard modern narrative. It is beautifully embellished, delightfully indelicate, and full of heart.”

“This novel arrives like the brightest comet, a dazzling work of art full of invention, playfulness and somewhat Chaucerian tale-telling, though this time told by fakirs in a far-off cemetery. Their ornate stories are full of mughals and caliphs, old kings and city black-outs, taking you to villages of sugarcane and to meet performers of dirges and various diverse djinns. This heady, compelling fusion of cultures – East meeting West – complete with oodles of social satire is a remarkable debut, no doubt about that. Imagine Italo Calvino came from Cardiff, was inspired by Indian-Persian poetry to re-conjure magical realism and you’ll just begin to get a sense of it. Easily the most remarkable work of fiction to come out of Wales in a thousand moons.”

“Four Dervishes is a fascinating adaptation of a medieval classic spun into a satirical and magical realist novel about our times.”