The latest addition to my website is Abdulla Qadiri‘s Oʻtgan kunlar (Days Gone By). This is allegedly the first full-length Uzbek novel and tells the tale of a love story which does not go as planned as well as the political situation in the region (Tashkent, Khanate of Kokand) in the mid-nineteen century, which is often bloody and nasty. Our hero, Atabek, falls in love but his parents do not approve and he has a conniving enemy trying to outdo him, all against the background of the aforementioned political situation.
English-speaking readers, however, may have been familiar with it, as it features in Hamid Ismailov‘s Jinlar Bazmi (The Devil’s Dance), a novel about Qadiri (spelt Qodiriy in that book), which I can highly recommend.