Asian Booklist

In the spring of 2017, 17-year-old Amika George founded the Free Periods movement on behalf of every schoolgirl who couldn’t afford tampons or sanitary towels. Three years later, in January 2020, these products became freely available to every schoolgirl in England for the first time, funded by the government. Anyone can make history, including a teenager launching a global campaign […]

1960s Uganda Hasan is struggling to run his family business following the sudden death of his wife. Just as he begins to see a way forward, a new regime seizes power, and a wave of rising prejudice threatens to sweep away everything he has built. Present-day London Sameer, a young high-flying lawyer, senses an emptiness in what he thought was […]

Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancée, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin's parents get to know Joe's firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own […]

Why are Muslim men portrayed as inherently violent? Does the veil violate women's rights? Is Islam stopping Muslims from integrating? Across western societies, Muslims are perhaps more misunderstood than any other minority. How did we get here? In this landmark book, Tawseef Khan draws on history, memoir and original research to show what it is really like to live as […]

You can't choose who you fall in love with, they say.If only it were that simple. Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddled two worlds - school and teenage crushes in one, and the expectations and unwritten rules of her family's south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two was sometimes a tightrope act, but she […]

Karachi. Pakistan's largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. It is a place of political turbulence where those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force, a place where it pays to have friends in the right places and to avoid making deadly enemies. It is a society where lavish wealth and absolute poverty live […]

Part memoir, part guide, Burning My Roti is essential reading for a new generation of South Asian women. With chapters covering sexual and cultural identity, body hair, colourism and mental health, and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to, Sharan Dhaliwal speaks openly about her journey towards loving herself, offering advice, support and […]

Throughout history, people have sought to improve society by reducing suffering, eliminating disease or enhancing desirable qualities in their children. But this wish goes hand in hand with the desire to impose control over who can marry, who can procreate and who is permitted to live. In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's ideas about evolution, a new […]

Brown Girl Like Me is an essential guidebook for South Asian women and girls on how to deal with growing up brown, female, marginalized and opinionated. Author Jaspreet Kaur pulls no punches, tackling difficult topics from mental health and menstruation stigma to education and beauty standards, from feminism to cultural appropriation and microaggressions. It will also address tough questions: Can […]

Uganda 1972 A devastating decree is issued: all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. They must take only what they can carry, give up their money and never return. For Asha and Pran, married a matter of months, it means abandoning the family business that Pran has worked so hard to save. For his mother, Jaya, it […]

Ex-detective Kamil Rahman is embroiled in a case that might just change his life - for better or for worse... Disgraced detective Kamil Rahman moves from Kolkata to London to start afresh as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. But the peace of his new life is soon shattered. The day Kamil caters an extravagant party, the powerful host, Rakesh, […]

A wide-ranging and affecting debut novel about family and identity, from an award-winning historian. 1981. Khalid Quraishi is one of the lucky ones. He works nights in the glitzy West End, and comes home every morning to his beautiful wife and daughter. He's a world away from Karachi and the family he left behind. But Khalid likes to gamble, and […]

This actually is a love story, just not the one Sunny was looking for... Sunny is the queen of living a double life. To her friends, she's the entertaining, eternally upbeat, single one, always on hand to share hilarious and horrifying date stories. But while they're all settling down with long-term partners and mortgages, Sunny is back in her childhood […]

Fox cub siblings Ted and Nancy are on the run from Princess Buttons, the scariest street cat in the Big City. They flee for Grimwood, expecting to find refuge in the peaceful countryside. Instead, they are met with thieving eagles, dramatic ducks, riotous rabbits and a whole host of unusual characters. Grimwood is . . . weird. But when Princess […]

A heart-wrenching and beautifully told debut novel about love, family obligation and finding your way. Nur and Yasmina are in loveThey’ve been together for four happy yearsBut Nur’s parents don’t know that Yasmina exists As Nur’s family counts down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, Nur is watching the clock more closely than most: he has made a pact with […]

How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is prejudiced, sexist and facing climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer? In Brown Baby, Nikesh Shukla, author of the bestselling The Good Immigrant, explores themes […]

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 […]

A captivating, powerful and luminous story from a bestselling, award-winning author about a mother, a daughter and the great Greenland shark. Wrapped up in mesmerising illustrations and presented as a deluxe hardback, this is a perfect gift for the holiday season, for 9+ fans of Philip Pullman, Sally Gardner and Frances Hardinge. The shark was beneath my bed, growing large […]

Indian family food with heart My Ammu, mother, is the centre of our family. This book is a tribute to the simple home-cooking from her kitchen in Calcutta. These dishes will bring warmth to your kitchen when you need a quick meal or dish to share with your family and friends. This is the food I cook for my family […]

Why do stories matter? I tell stories to make sense of the world as I see it. The world I have lived and experienced, read about and heard about, and what I want it to be. I tell stories to make sense of myself. Nikesh Shukla, author, writing mentor and bestselling editor of The Good Immigrant, knows better than most […]

Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions […]

There are curries on almost every continent, with a stunning diversity of flavours and textures across India alone, and many more interpretations the world over, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Trinidad and the UK. But curry is difficult to define. The word has origins in ancient India, but its adoption by Portuguese and British colonisers saw curry reinterpreted in the […]

Successful London lawyer Jia Khan is a long way from the grubby Northern streets she knew as a child, where her father, Akbar Khan, led the Pakistani community and ran the local organised crime syndicate. Often his Jirga rule – the old way – was violent and bloody, but it was always justice of a kind. Now, with her father […]

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offences at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education programme he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers’ Hall, some of whom […]

Mary is a difficult grandmother for Durga to love. She is sharp-tongued and ferocious, with more demons than there are lines on her palms. When Durga visits her in rural Malaysia, she only wants to endure Mary, and the dark memories home brings, for as long as it takes to escape. But a reckoning is coming. Stuck together in the […]

If you're fat and Indian, you're rich; if you're fat and poor, you're lying. It's only the West where the rich are thin and vegan and moral… Ramesh Kumar grew up deprived and unloved, working on his father's tea stall in the Old City of Delhi. Now, brilliant but poor, he makes a lucrative living taking tests for the sons […]

The Coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods around the world - and continues to do so. These personal tragedies will, and must, be told and heard. There is, however, also a truthful and objective scientific narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. Spike is that story - […]

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. His son’s nursery has called to ask where little Max is. Your worst nightmare… Leila was supposed to drop Max off that morning. But she forgot. Racing to the carpark, she grasps the horror of what she […]

A journey of reclamation through the natural landscapes of the North, brilliantly exploring identity, nature, place and belonging. Beautifully written and truly inspiring, I Belong Here heralds a powerful and refreshing new voice in nature writing. Anita Sethi was on a journey through Northern England when she became the victim of a race-hate crime. The crime was a vicious attack […]

Halfway through her PhD, computer scientist Asha has her future all mapped out. Then a chance meeting and whirlwind romance with her old high-school crush, Cyrus, changes everything. Together with their friend Jules they come up with a revolutionary idea: to build a social networking app that could bring meaning to millions of lives. While Asha creates an ingenious algorithm, […]

A woman strangled in a Mayfair flat. A man fleeing the scene. Xander Shute saw it all - but the police won't believe someone who lives on the streets. Determined to find justice for the murdered woman, Xander searches for answers. But as his recollection of the crime comes under increasing scrutiny, he is forced to confront other memories, including […]

In I'm A Fan single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the […]

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson in his failing attempts to be magisterial, has adopted many of his hero's mannerism! And, as Tariq Ali agrees, Churchill was undoubtedly right in 1940-41 to refuse to capitulate to fascism. However, he was also […]

1929. At a farm in Punjab, northern India, three girls are married to three brothers in one ceremony. For weeks afterwards, segregated from the men in the ‘china room’, heavily veiled, and meeting their husbands only under cover of darkest night, none of the girls is entirely sure which brother is hers. Mehar, the youngest of the three, is determined […]

Kamil Rahman is a cook in a Brick Lane restaurant. But he used to be a detective back in Kolkata. And somehow trouble still knows how to find him. When a young woman Kamil knows is murdered the police are convinced her boyfriend is the culprit. Kamil isn't so sure and feels he has no choice but to start his […]

Sabrina Mahfouz once sat in a Whitehall interview room and was interrogated about everything from her political leanings to her private life. It was ostensibly a job interview, but implicit in their demands was the unspoken question: as a woman of Middle Eastern heritage, could she really be trusted? Years later, Sabrina found herself confronting the meaning behind this interrogation, […]

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When Arifa Akbar discovered that her sister had fallen seriously ill, she assumed there would be a brief spell in hospital and then she'd be home. This was not to be. It was not until the day before she died that the family discovered she was […]

In this suitably dramatic rollercoaster of a teenage memoir, Tez takes us back to where it all began: a working class, insular British Asian Muslim community in his hometown of post-Thatcher Blackburn. Meet Ammi (Mum), Baji Rosey (the older sister), Shibz (the fashionable cousin), Was (the cool cousin), Shiry (the cleverest cousin) and a community with the most creative nicknames […]

Sadia is a comedian who loves sex. She is also a hijab-wearing Muslim woman. The two are in a lifelong relationship, but it's complicated. In this vibrant, funny and conversation-starting memoir, Sadia shows how the different sides of her identity and personality have fought and embraced each other over the course of her life. From being viewed as a 'sister' […]

"Miss, do you really think we can all help? Even me?" - Tammy, 8 years old. Growing up, there is so much out of our control, so much we can feel helpless about, and so many terrible things we have to watch grown-ups doing to our world. But when it comes to understanding and righting wrongs - it's always children […]

How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent […]

She was never meant to be an ordinary woman, reading out her history as if it belonged to us. She was more than that. She was the way of learning the world. It was the last time most of us would see her but we didn't know that then. Aida is the defining rock star of her age; her every […]

The Way We Were charts the dreams and disappointments of a group of British Muslim women; Jenna, Kees and Malak. They have been friends for years: the three of them together against the world is how it's always been. Yet one night changes everything between them and they are left adrift, marooned from each other as their lives take different […]

Sarfraz Manzoor grew up in a working-class Pakistani Muslim family in Luton - where he was raised to believe that they were different, they had an alien culture and they would never accept him. They were white people. In today's deeply divided Britain we are often told they are different, they have a different culture and values and they will […]

The glow of my cigarette picks out a dark shape lying on the ground. I bend down to take a closer look. It’s a dead sparrow. I wondered if I had become that bird, disoriented and lost.’ Young, handsome and contemptuous of his father’s traditional ways, PK Malik leaves Bombay to start a new life in America. Stopping in Manchester […]

Demetri wants to study criminology at university to understand why people around him carry knives. Jhemar is determined to advocate for his community following the murder of a loved one. Carl's exclusion leaves him vulnerable to the sinister school-to-prison pipeline, but he is resolute to defy expectations. Tony, the tireless manager of a community centre, is fighting not only for […]

It's time to take your power backBut first you're going to have to pick a side . . . Every time Sara Javed switches on her laptop, checks her phone or goes outside, people are shouting. Everyone seems to be angry about something and she just wishes that they would all shut up. Until she realises that perhaps she should take […]

In Case of Emergency tells the story of Beryl 'Bel' Kumar, a woman who has a near-death experience at work and is mortified to find that her boss has notified an ex-boyfriend from years ago, still listed in HR's records as her next of kin. This reunion leaves Bel questioning everything. She is happy and successful with lots of friends […]

Dr Shahed Yousaf is a prison doctor dedicated to caring for people on the margins of society. An outsider on the inside, in Stitched Up he introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, including killers, con men and auto-cannibals. To Dr Yousaf, they are patients first and prisoners second - because any one of us could end up on […]

When Amy Blahn was murdered on a London office rooftop, Layla Mahoney was there. She held Amy as she died. But all she can say when police arrest her is that 'It was Michael. Find Michael and you'll find out everything you need to know.' The problem is, the police can't find Michael - there is no evidence that he […]

In Joma West's Face, Margaret Atwood meets Kazuo Ishiguro in this sci-fi domestic drama that reimagines race and class in a genetically engineered society fed by performative fame. How much is your Face worth? Schuyler and Madeleine Burroughs have the perfect Face--rich and powerful enough to assure their dominance in society. But in SchAddie's household, cracks are beginning to appear. […]

A powerful, campaigning intervention by one of Britain’s most senior law enforcers, roundly debunking the myth of progress in racial equality ― particularly in the workplace ― and offering a blueprint for the future. Have you ever wondered why, as Britain becomes more diverse, so many of our leaders come from the same narrow pool? Can it be acceptable in […]