Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Seven top books of extremely British satire

Hannah Rothschild CBE is a British writer, documentary filmmaker, businesswoman and philanthropist. Her biography, The Baroness, was published in 2012 in the UK, US and twelve other territories. Her first novel, The Improbability of Love, published in 2015 won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for best comic novel and was runner up for the Bailey Women's Prize for fiction in 2015.

Her much anticipated new novel is House of Trelawney.

At Lit Hub, Rothschild tagged "seven books that exemplify the long and glorious tradition of British Social Satires." One title on the list:
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi also uses humor to take on the taboos of race relations and bigotry. In his 1990 novel Buddha of Suburbia, Karim, a young man of Indian descent feels trapped between the world of his Indian ancestors and his country of birth. His father, a bureaucrat by day, moonlights as a dhoti wearing swarmi by night and his mother is too depressed to leave the house. Karim leaves suburbia hoping to find freedom in the theater only to be cast as the Indian boy Mowgli in the Jungle Book.
Read about the other entries on the list.

The Buddha of Suburbia is among Sathnam Sanghera's best contemporary British-Asian novels.

--Marshal Zeringue