out January 2026
Cover photograph by Charles Boyle
UK:
“Farah Ali’s Telegraphy pulls off quite the literary feat: it manages to make a ghoulish fascination with human bodies—living, dead and transitioning from the former to the latter—into something ethereal, a necessarily spiritual preoccupation.” Kit Maude in Necessary Fiction
“Telegraphy, writer and translator Farah Ali’s inventive second novel, takes this premise in an unexpected direction. Beyond presenting the body as a carrier of individual trauma, the novel reveals how it functions like a delicate telegraphic system that receives signals across time and geography.” —Taha Kehar in The News on Sunday
“Farah Ali’s novel, Telegraphy, connects the past with the present, the mythical with the ‘real’. It connects our desires, our longing, the fear that haunts even waking hours, with what we end up becoming – pieces of a whole that was fractured from the beginning, the skin around the bones just a fragile casing for the unbearable weight of suffering. Well-crafted, deeply pensive, this is a novel that speaks to each one of us, if we dare to speak to ourselves.”
—Feryal Ali Gauhar
“Telegraphy is a deeply strange book. The ethereal quality of Farah Ali’s writing holds this curious, clever, almost devious book with such tenderness, I felt I was in the hands of a writer who had been working for decades to distil this fine work.”
—Lara Pawson
“What a strange and beautiful book.”
—Shandana Minhas
“A true book of the body, its pains and resonances, and a bold, unique structure with a captivating voice.”
—Han Smith
