Sameer Rahim writes:

Husain was born in East London in 1975 to an Indian father and a Bangladeshi mother. According to his book, his earliest memories are of an idyllic country untouched by ethnic or religious conflict: 'green, serene'. The occasional skinhead shouted abuse, he says, but the 'colour-blind humanity' of his teachers more than compensated. His family saw nothing wrong in buying cakes from a Jewish baker. His Koran teachers preserved the mezuzahs on the door of their building out of respect for the People of the Book. When he was nine he read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and wondered if Allah and Islam had anything to do with Aslan. Things changed when he went to secondary school.

(LRB 19 July 2007)

Penguin Books Ltd | Paperback 304 pp. |ISBN: 9780141030432