The Agony of the Ghost and Other Stories

Hasan Azizul Huq is known for his stories that bring a powerful social consciousness to bear on the lives of ordinary people in contemporary Bangladesh-but doing so with surprising twists to what we think of as the typical grounds of realistic fiction. *The Agony of the Ghost* gathers twelve remarkable stories from his large oeuvre that offer a sense of the range of his insights and approaches. In "Without Name or Lineage," a man returns home in search of his wife and son after the war, only to find them in ways both unexpected and expected. "The Sorcerer" finds a sorcerer dying without revealing his secrets to three brothers who had been trying to compel him to tell-and strange deaths follow. In " Throughout the Afternoon," a disarmingly simple story, a young boy awaits his grandfather's death. In all the stories, the lives of the most disadvantaged people in Bengali society are revealed in harrowing, unforgettable detail.