I am very late to the party with this book, but I got there in the end and what a book.

It grabs you by the lapels and drags you along: it’s funny, dark and full of sex. Karim is stuck out in the suburbs of south London and bored. Bored with his life, with school, with his parents until his father starts to sit cross-legged at Eva’s house and pass on his wisdom from years of chanting and meditating. His father, Haroon, falls in love with Eva and eventually leaves his wife, Karim’s mother, and starts a new life, moving out of the suburbs and into London.

Meanwhile, Karim’s uncle, Anwar, becomes insistent that his daughter have an arranged marriage; he even goes on hunger strike to get his way and so here we have two Indian men who behave differently. One takes up the freedom and lack of Indian traditions and the other clings to them slavishly with little thought for his daughter.

Karim escapes the suburbs, becoming successful as an actor, staying in London and living the life. It’s just that it turns out it isn’t the life he wants, which is often the case, and so he returns home. Escape is everything in this book from Jammila finding a way to live with and escape her arranged marriage to Eva and Haroon living in London and holding parties for people who are semi-famous.

As my darling new mother (whom I loved) moved radiantly about the room introducing Derek, who had just directed Equus at the Contact Theatre, to Robert, who was a designer; as she spoke of the new Dylan album and what Riverside Studios was doing, I saw that she wanted to scour that suburban stigma right off her body. She didn’t realize it was in the blood and not on the skin; she didn’t see there could be nothing more suburban that suburbanites repudiating themselves.

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There are times when the book is uncomfortable if not a little blunt, particularly about the British and our attitutdes to foreigners, but it is also follows on in the tradition of claiming that suburbia is boring, constraining and needs to be escaped whereas the city is exciting, diverse and a place for experimentation. Plot wise, this is an A to B to A story with a gradual acceptance from Karim that he is shaped by suburbia and the people who love him. It is a story of a new type of Britishness, one where cultural and self-identity are less clear but accepts the fact that the majority of us are suburban.