The Brown Brontë

This week is Armed Forces Week, ending in Armed Forces Day on 27 th June. But Google it and the images that come up are overwhelmingly of white service personnel. The past few weeks has seen the Black Lives Matter movement gain momentum, with demonstrations and protests against the whitewashing of Britain’s colonial past, the silencing of Black voices, continued institutional racism, and in the literary world, a much-needed conversation about the erasure of black, Asian and ethnic minority voices in history and literature. Countering this movement are assertions that the removal of statues commemorating certain figures is an attempt to “rewrite” our history. But we can’t claim to be concerned over rewriting history so long as we have a selective memory regarding that history.  Image Courtesy: IWM I started researching for this blog post in an attempt to address that selective memory in the spirit of anti-racism, and to shine a light on forgotten voices and experiences. W

Adults   1.         Devotion, Louisa Young Set in Italy and Britain in the 1930s, as Tom, Kitty, Nadine and Riley spend the summers with their friends in Rome. It’s an idyllic place and time, and Tom finds himself falling in love with Nenna. Then fascism rears its ugly head, and worryingly, Nenna’s father Aldo seems to be in agreement with Mussolini. Nadine’s Jewish background means the family must cut their summer short and return to England. But Tom is determined not to leave without Nenna. The way Young traced the progression from bog-standard populism to out-and-out fascist antisemitism is cleverly done and frankly terrifying. Read with heart in mouth.   2.        Last Train to Istanbul, Ayse Kulin The little-known story of how during the Holocaust, the Turkish government helped its Jewish citizens flee from Europe and welcomed them back to Turkey, by supplying them with fake Muslim or Christian identities and chartering a train to carry them home. Told from the point

Balli Kaur Jaswal’s novel follows three sisters on a road trip across India to complete their late mother’s last rites. In order to do this, the three of them have had to press pause on their own personal issues and focus on mending their fraught relationships with each other. Jaswal’s writing is full of humour and warmth, delivering a narrative that’s both funny and poignant. The three sisters’ characters are distinctly drawn, from the bossy-but-capable Rajni, to the reserved Shireen to hot-mess Jezmeen. The narrative is split between the viewpoints of the sisters, which is useful for gaining an insight into their individual personal problems and for contrasting this against how each sister is seen by the others. What Jaswal does well in this book is to show how it’s possible for adult siblings’ relationships to fragment under the pressure of other relationships – marriages, children, careers all take their toll. But at the same time, there is always a sense that our siblings

In her tautly-written debut, author Damyanti Biswas explores the misogyny, corruption and social inequalities that exist in Delhi’s seamy underbelly. Dark and atmospheric, the book sits within the Indian noir genre that has inspired Hindi movies such as Mardaani and Talaash. It follows psychotherapist Dr Anjali Morgan as she juggles her work at a women’s project in inner-city Delhi, with her complicated personal life: her fraught relationship with her teenage son Nikhil, who has autism; her friendship with Maya who runs a small detective agency, and her on-off affair with Maya’s brother, Special Crime Commissioner Jatin Bhatt. When the three of them begin to work on a case solving a spate of grotesque murders in which slum women are raped and killed, their faces disfigured with acid, it exposes old scars and creates new ones in the personal lives of the main characters. With her brooding writing style and the narrative split between multiple viewpoints, Biswas skilfully lays bare the h