Recommendations
Books Like Buddha of Suburbia
Half-English half-Indian, navigating race and class in Thatcher's Britain
If The Buddha of Suburbia caught you — Karim's comic swagger, the suburban house parties, the theatre scenes, the way race and class and sexuality all get negotiated at once — these eight novels share its bildungsroman energy, its portrait of British South Asian identity, or its satire of the English social world.
- 1Buy
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
Two families — one Bangladeshi, one English-Jamaican — navigating identity, history, and London across three generations — Smith's debut is the most direct companion to The Buddha of Suburbia: the same multicultural London, the same satire of the English social world, and the same sense that British identity is more complicated and more interesting than either the English or the immigrants want to admit; where Karim is a single consciousness navigating multiple worlds, Smith gives us an ensemble
- 2Buy
Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
Nazneen arriving from Bangladesh for an arranged marriage and making herself at home over twenty years in Tower Hamlets — Ali's debut is the female, more introverted counterpart to The Buddha of Suburbia's male, extroverted picaresque; both are about a South Asian protagonist finding a self in Britain, but where Karim moves rapidly through social worlds, Nazneen's world contracts and expands much more slowly
- 3Buy
The Black Album
by Hanif Kureishi
Shahid Hasan, a young British-Pakistani student in 1989 London, torn between a secular intellectual woman and an Islamist student group — Kureishi's second novel is the direct companion to The Buddha of Suburbia, set a decade later and engaging directly with the Rushdie Affair; where Karim negotiates his identity through theatre and sexuality, Shahid negotiates his through religion and politics
- 4Buy
My Ear at His Heart
by Hanif Kureishi
Kureishi's memoir about discovering his father's unpublished novel and the relationship between them — the nonfiction companion to The Buddha of Suburbia, which drew on the same material; for readers who want to understand the autobiographical foundation beneath the novel's comic surface and Kureishi's actual experience of his British-Pakistani father's relationship to England
- 5Buy
Londonstani
by Gautam Malkani
Jas and his crew of rudeboys in Hounslow — Malkani's debut about British South Asian youth culture and the performance of identity in contemporary London; the generational successor to The Buddha of Suburbia, showing what happened to British Asian identity in the twenty years after Karim's adventures, when the language, music, and style had all changed but the fundamental negotiations had not
- 6Buy
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha falling from a bombed plane and transforming — one toward the divine, one toward the devilish — Rushdie's controversial novel is the high-literary companion to The Buddha of Suburbia in its portrait of the British immigrant experience, its magical-realist approach to race and identity, and its preoccupation with what it means to try to become English
- 7Buy
Fever Pitch
by Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby's obsession with Arsenal Football Club as an autobiography of masculine formation — Hornby's memoir was published the year after The Buddha of Suburbia and shares its portrait of an Englishman in the 1970s and 1980s working out who he is through cultural obsession; where Karim's formation is through theatre and sex, Hornby's is through football; the two books together map the range of what English masculine identity looks like in the same decade
- 8Buy
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Four perspectives on the Windrush generation in 1948 London — Levy's Orange Prize winner is the historical companion to The Buddha of Suburbia: the story of the generation whose arrival in Britain made Karim's existence possible; reading Small Island after The Buddha of Suburbia shows where the world Karim navigates came from
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