Abandoned.

I am obviously a fan of poetic novels, so I was eager to read this when reviews cited its poetic style and how psychologically resonant the interior life, musings, and grief of the narrator were rendered.

I found the latter to be the book's strength; however, I could no longer read after the midway point due to what felt like trite and contrived prose. The pacing and style felt almost as if the book were directed to young adult audiences, and that's not a genre I read at all.

Perhaps Ali Smith's praise for this novel set my expectations too high. Perhaps I'm just not in a sappy, love-lost kind of mood. ( )

This book is a love poem.

I stay clear of love stories. I grew up watching old black and white movies, and reading books like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and falling in love over and over again. In my imagination I was always in love.

I don't think that I am really so different now, but love itself is very different: much broader, yet much more precise, and not at all related to the tangled relationship of two individuals.

I've wondered at this distaste of mine, at the undeniable feeling of boredom that arises when I am faced with what are called "love stories" in books. (I don't mind seeing some romantic movies to pass the time, but the thought of reading a book whose plot is focused on "love achieved" feels like a punishment.) When does "believing in love" become an exercise in the "suspension of disbelief"?

This beautiful book is a tender rendition of a young man's doomed love for a young woman. They have but moments together, when they are still children, but the penalty for these moments is severe. They are separated, and the young man's life is forever altered. His tale, written in the first-person, is a love affair with his memory of this very young love. It has kept him alive. And his voice is cautious and sad, but hopeful, too, as he writes.

It's a love letter, a record of change (changes in our bodies, our spirits, our wounds and recovery, our home, our hopes, our country), and a farewell. I am touched by the tenderness of this author's imagination. In writing this, he expresses a love that is simpler than the convoluted dramas we know too well. Perhaps it's an imagined love, which they all seem to be, abiding within my modern cynicism, yet entirely believable in its simplicity. Maybe my early reading created this desire in me to make love an uncomplicated thing. So that with this book, I was able to rest in its beauty, as I do in a poem.

A sweet, sad book, that I am very glad to have read. This review is not worthy of Peter Hobbs's short and fluid work of beauty. The changing landscape, the fragrant orchard of pomegranates and swallows, the skies and dusty path, the brilliant example of Abbas, the kind scholar, and even of the child Alifa, in her imperious and likely terrible destiny, will stay with me. They are not filled-in characters, but vignettes in what a life would look like from the view of a hopeful person looking in, from the outside, seeing what he (she) wants to see, and finding that his love of love (life) informs his vision. A vision of what life (love) is, and what it could be. ( )

This novel affirms the human need to hold fast to the possibility of love and beauty against the overwhelming forces of circumstance and history, which like a tidal wave threaten the human heart with annihilation. The few minutes of nectar-like bliss the narrator experiences with Saba are like seeds planted in the narrator's soul, and these seeds will come to fruition as the gift of the text itself to Saba, regardless of her reality. ( )

This short novel was basically an extended letter from the protagonist to his forbidden sweetheart, Saba. After fifteen years of imprisonment, illness, abuse and torture, the young slowly starts to recover, and in a small garden he writes to his beloved about the present and the years that have separated them. Each day he visits his family's old orchard where he finds peace and contentment.

I loved Abbas, the poet, who took the young man in and tended to his physical and emotional injuries. His gentleness and kindness played a key role in the healing process.

"In the Orchard, the Swallows" was a gentle, heart-breaking story about love, survival and the human condition. The last chapter, especially, was absolutely beautiful. ( )

A brilliantly, economical novel, which is written like one long love letter. A Pakistan boy is imprisoned and tortured for 15 years because he was found sleeping in his father's orchard with the daughter of a political figure. It's his love for the girl that gets him through the 15 years. ( )