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the Edge of Town,” Hanif Kureishi “probably ranks the best-
known documenter of suburban Asian London, particularly in his
debut 1970s-set novel
The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990),” successive
writers, such as Nirpal Dhaliwal in
Tourism
(2006), Nikesh Shukla
in
Coconut Unlimited
(2010), and Gautam Malkani in
Londonstani
(2006a), are given credit for showing “multiple versions of Asian
suburbia” (Huq, 2012: 7, 9). While depicting suburban Asian
London, these novels, on the one hand, subvert “the usual
stereotypical depiction” of the suburb as “boring, white and
middle-aged,” and, on the other hand, by focusing on
second-generation South Asian diaspora, they “place youth culture
and the city’s outer limits at their centre, thus revisiting familiar
themes of identity, migration and diaspora” (Huq, 2012: 10).
Among the post-Kureishi novels that depict suburban Asian
London, Malkani’s
Londonstani
was a “much-anticipated debut”
well before its release (Clark, 2005). The novel is reported to have
“gripped many editors amid the clamour of the recent Frankfurt
Book Fair” in 2005 because of its “freshness and urgency” (Rickett,
2005). Dubbed the “new Zadie/Monica” and the “Muslim Irvine
Welsh,” Malkani is said to have received a six-figure advance from
the publisher, Fourth Estate, who was eager to secure the
manuscript, as it believed that the novel “‘catapults you into a
world you’ve never read about in fiction before’” (Sethi, 2005).
Although the novel ended up not selling as well as the publisher
expected, in more recent reviews, it is argued that it is “more
representative of current demographic trends than the usual
inner-city=[sic] ethnic area clichés” because it narrates a tale “from
the outer reaches,” namely suburbia, which “many second
generation Asians
—
the children of suburbia
—
have actively
chosen” “as their residential location on becoming adults
themselves” (Huq, 2012: 12). Centered on second- and
third-generation Indian British youths, the novel is set in the ethnic
enclave of Hounslow, West London, where the author, who is of
Indian origin, was locally born and raised. Close to London’s