M. G. Vassanji
Paperback, 244pp. ISBN: 0771087225
McClelland & Stewart/Tundra BooksPub.
October 1997 Fiction
No New Land is an original, wryly humorous novel by M. G. Vassanji.
It is the mid-1970s: Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. We meet the Lalani family and a cast of wonderfully drawn characters. There is the slick, up-and-coming lawyer Jamali; his teacher friend Nanji, a moral questioner and a romantic; Esmail, a baker, who falls victim to a near fatal racial incident; the irrepressible Romesh, from Guyana, who introduces Nurdin to the forbidden pleasures of the city. Nurdin Lalani's story is told with a fine sense of life's ambiguities and the possibilities of renewal.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Paperback, 205 pages ISBN: 1-85381-642-6
Virago Press Aug 1995
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's personal account of growing up in East Africa up to the time of Idi Amin. Uganda in the 1950s had become home to a dispossessed Asian community who had left India in the decades before. Some came as indentured labourers, later becoming dukanwallas running their small dusty shops - laying the foundation of a future entrepreneurial empire in East Africa. Against this backdrop, Yasmin grew up in a family and a community whose belief in its supremacy over the African and its subservience to the European was riddled with contradictions, fear and paranoia which culminated in Idi Amin's violent expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s.
Gurharpal Singh ; John Martin
ISBN:0750922265
128 Pages, 19 Oct 2000
Sutton Publishing Ltd
Since the arrival of Ugandan Asians in 1972, Leicester has become the location of one of the most thriving Asian communities in Britain. A history of Asians in Leicester and the city's transformation from a prosperous East Midlands market town to the leading multicultural city in Europe. This title chronicles the lives of Asian settlers - their work, leisure and housing as well as environmental impact, festivals, religious institutions, and the arts. The experience of ordinary memenbers of the Asian community, such as barbers, industrial workers, teahcers, women's groups and shopkeepers as well as businessmen, broadcasters and doctors are recorded. This visual record will be of interest to anyone interested in race, politics and local history