Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories, our book of short stories was published by Key Porter Books on Saturday 5 January 2008.
The book can be ordered from Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca.
This is from the book jacket:
Set in India, Burma, England, the Czech Republic, Greenland, the US, and Canada, from World War II to the present, Happiness and Other Disorders offers subtle and vivid portraits of characters and societies torn apart by violence and oppression.
Ahmad Saidullah displays a fine command over a wide and complex range of emotional effects, narrative styles, genres, and devices, all woven together in this debut collection.
In “Vatan and the Cow”, an old man, whose son has married out of his religion, is forced to go on a pilgrimage to a holy place in the foothills of the Himalayas, only to return home empty-handed and broken in spirit.
In “Flight into Egypt”, which was a finalist in the Drunken Boat Pan Literary Awards, an unnamed man flees on a train bound for Bombay after assassinating a politician during a religious riot in western India.
“Happiness and Other Disorders” is a comic account of the editor's back problems written in a unique run-on style. And “The Guest” is the haunting story of an Indian woman whose musical madness reveals a peculiarly Scottish slant.
