Brown Baby

Mar 3

Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla
Reviewed by Linda
📕📕📕📕📕

Thank you to @jessduffyy @bluebirdbooksforlife for this stunning copy. Wow, just wow. Brown Baby is a wonder and we cannot wait until more people read it!

Nikesh’s debut memoir is as heartwarming as it is moving and just so incomparably deep. There were many moments where I pulled the book close to my chest to savour the words and pause to think about family - what our parents have done for us and what we’re able to do as a result. Whilst our parents were tasked with survival, we are a limbo generation adjusting to societal climes and the immigration generation gap between us and the generation before us has never been so vast.

Nikesh doesn’t follow chronological events but instead talks from his heart in this wonderful letter to his daughters, his brown babies. How do you speak to your kids about race when the default setting is white? How does a father champion feminism? This memoir is peppered with questions, answers, anecdotes and a lot of deep thinking ensued.

I was taken out of the present and I even dared to peep into the future, consider what parenthood would be like and the implications of today’s world on tomorrow’s children. Reliving his childhood and early adulthood, Nikesh examines his parent’s sacrifices, from his days at school and weekends at the family-owned factory to his uni days and early career.

But above all it is the powerful and precious relationship with his late mother that sets this memoir apart from the rest. Her wit and charm, her food and her love were tangible and it is clear that as Nikesh writes about this powerhouse of a woman, he grieves at the same time. With narratives such as this one, and what felt like Nikesh talking to me personally, perhaps there is some hope out there for our little ones. Brown Baby is intimate and educational at the same time and you just need to read it ASAP. I personally loved the father/daughter narrative and we need to see more of this in literary fiction and non-fiction.

nikesh shuklabrown babybluebird booksnon-fictionmemoirautobiographypanmacmillanLinda

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

Brown Baby

Brown Baby

Woman At Point Zero