poliphilo

Mr Hai came to Britain from post-partition India as a political refugee in the late 1940s. He acquired British citizenship (which was easy in those days) and- having finally gotten married (to a bride selected for him from the sub-Continent)- was determined to bring his children up to be "proper English".

But....

His daughter's book is both autobiography (lightly fictionalized) and an anecdotal, personalized history of the British Asian experience over the past 60-70 years. It's funny, charming, scary, frequently moving and has a lot to say about the ways in which cultural identity gets wrangled and agonized over- and how it changes through time.