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Asian Booklist Quarterly: Jul-Sep 2021

Discover new books by British-Asian authors

Update from Kia

This past month, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: how do you write fiction when you’ve pretty much gone nowhere, seen no one and done nothing for almost a year and a half?

I've seen friends and family sporadically, but I need far more fuel than fleeting drinks with those I already know. I enjoy people-watching, eavesdropping and collecting interesting anecdotes. I like hearing a distinctive laugh or spotting a striking face and thinking I’ll be having that. Living in a vacuum has sapped my creativity and I’ve found myself struggling to write.

One welcome diversion has been my project with the Trussell Trust, a UK charity who run a network of food banks. My profits from my upcoming novel, Next of Kin, will be donated to the Trussell Trust when pre-ordered through my website. For the RRP of £14.99, readers will receive a signed hardback including free P&P to the UK.

I know that some of you have already pre-ordered it and I want to say a huge thank you for that. Those who haven’t can pre-order Next of Kin here. We’re aiming for 2,000 pre-orders which – if you know anything about selling books – is an extremely lofty target, so every order really will help.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at the new books coming up this quarter.

New books by British-Asian authors

The Pizzeria Vesuvio looks like any other Italian restaurant in London – with a few small differences. The chefs who make the pizza fiorentinas are Sri Lankan, and half the kitchen staff are illegal immigrants. At the centre is Tuli, the restaurant's charismatic proprietor and resident Robin Hood, who promises to help anyone in need. Welsh nineteen-year-old Nia, haunted by […]


 

A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles. Bombay, 1950. For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on […]


 

Transform and recycle household objects into your very own home-made toys and machines. Learn about the centre of gravity by making a balancing bird, create a toroidal vortex with a smoke-ring machine, and turn a spoon into an electromagnet. Chances are you won’t need to buy the materials required for these machines because they’re all in your house right now. […]


 

'I'm a girl and northern and brown, didn't you know? A triple threat!' Trying to navigate her Indian world at home and the British world outside her front door, Anita Rani was a girl who didn't ­fit in anywhere. She was always destined to stand out: from playing Mary in her otherwise all white nursery nativity to growing up in […]


 

From fresh new voice Aliya Ali-Afzal, Would I Lie to You? is a page-turning, warm and funny debut about what happens when you have your dream life – and are about to lose it. At the school gates, Faiza fits in. It took a few years, but now the snobbish mothers who mistook her for the nanny treat her as one of […]


 

The Giant Dark is an award-winning debut novel about love and fame. Aida is a rock star at her peak with a devoted cultish fanbase who follow her every move. When she disappears into a complicated love affair with an ex, they are determined to uncover her truths. After a decade of silence, Aida and Ehsan reconnect, hoping to recreate the […]


 

A funny, magical story, ideal for children practising their reading at home or in school. Manju's stuck at home and she is most definitely BORED. Looking for entertainment, she summons the genie from the magic lamp. When he turns up with a terrible cold, the genie can't hear any of Manju's wishes properly and his magic is even more strange […]


 

The Roles We Play is Sabba Khan's debut graphic novel collecting a series of short essays that explore themes of identity, belonging and memory within the East London Pakistani Muslim diaspora. Together the stories paint a vivid snapshot of contemporary British Asian life and the complex generational shifts experienced within migrant communities today. Issues of race, gender and class are […]


 

A magical, eye-opening account of a journey into a Europe that rarely makes the news and is in danger of being erased altogether. Another Europe. A Europe few people believe exists and many wish didn't. Muslim Europe. Writer and documentary-maker Tharik Hussain sets off with his wife and young daughters around the Western Balkans, home to the largest indigenous Muslim […]


 

60 hours a week. 240 patients. 10 minutes to make a diagnosis. Welcome to the surgery. Charting his 15 years working as a GP, from rookie to becoming a partner in one of the UK’s busiest surgeries, Dr Amir Khan’s stories are as much about community and care as they are about blood tests and bodily fluids. Along the way, he introduces us […]


 

‘From now on when you see something, you’re seeing it because I want you to see it. When you think of something, it’ll be because I want you to think about it…’ And with those words, the obsession begins. A writer has left his family in Brooklyn for a three month residency at the Deuter Centre in Berlin, hoping for undisturbed days […]


 

We still do not know how to talk about sex. The current debate about sexual entitlement, objectification, rape culture or pornography fixates on the idea of consent as an objective frame through which to view our sexual encounters. Yet stripped of morality and ethics, consent is a blunt tool, of limited use when contemplating one of the oldest and most […]


 

A contemporary story about life in foster care, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Wilson. Ruby Ali's eighteen-year-old sister Alisha has left the care centre where they live, and Ruby is being sent to live with a new foster family. If she can sabotage life at her new home, she'll get to go and live with her sister again, right? But […]


 

The shark was beneath my bed, growing large as the room, large as the lighthouse, rising from unfathomable depths until it ripped the whole island from its roots. The bed was a boat, the shark a tide, and it pulled me so far out to sea I was only a speck, a spot, a mote, a dying star in an […]


 

On an ordinary working day, Leila Syed receives a call that cleaves her life in two. Her brother-in-law’s voice is filled with panic. He’s at his son’s nursery to pick up Max. But he isn’t there. Leila was supposed to drop Max off that morning. But she forgot. Racing to the carpark, she grasps the horror of […]


 

Aarti has lived on the island with Aunt for as long as she can remember. Like the weather, Aunt rules her world with rare warmth. Aarti's only comforts are a book of Indian myths full of blue gods, a fox's friendship, and a toy rabbit she finds in a locked room. Then, she learns Aunt has been feeding her lies. […]


 

Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology. Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person? […]


 

Laugh your head off with this fully-illustrated new series from award-winning Nadia Shireen. Perfect for readers age 7 to 107, fans of Dog Man, Roald Dahl, Mr Gum and David Walliams, and anyone who loves to laugh. Fox cub siblings Ted and Nancy are on the run from Princess Buttons, the scariest street cat in the Big City. They flee […]


 

Join Roma Agrawal, the award-winning young structural engineer who worked on The Shard, for an exciting behind-the-scenes look at some of the world's most amazing landmarks. Meet the extraordinary people who challenged our beliefs about what's possible, pioneering remarkable inventions that helped build the Brooklyn Bridge in the US, the Pantheon in Italy, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Shard […]


 

You're in at 7am, there until 7pm and marking into the late hours. You've got one student who's a full time carer, another who's pregnant, and a third who's just joined a gang. You haven't got enough textbooks to go around, and one of the parents just called you an 'extremist'. You've just gone through a devastating heartbreak and you […]

Editor's choice

In Minarets in the Mountains, writer Tharik Hussain sets off with his wife and young daughters around the Western Balkans to explore a region where Islam has shaped places and people for more than half a millennium. They visit Islamic lodges clinging to the side of mountains, pray in mosques older than the Sistine Chapel and explore the historical roots of European Islamophobia. Pre-order it now on AmazonWaterstones or Hive.  

Browse all 2020 books, check out more 2021 books and tell your friends to sign up to Asian Booklist.

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