Good Intentions: ‘Captivating and heartbreaking’ Stylist

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A] clever novel about vulnerability and victimhood that subtly subverts the reader’s expectations’ Sunday Times An eloquently lyrical and thought-provoking novel, this book grapples with subject matters of everything you can imagine. From race, to identity, to the world of technology, to gentrification, to discovery, to self h*rm, all the way to the adversity of life itself.

Moving, modern and utterly engaging. What a talent’ Rhik Samadder, author of I Never Said I Love You Good Intentions is a heartbreaking story of a young man caught between worlds—between youth and adulthood, between family and passion, between ambition and survival. Kasim Ali builds a quiet yet unbearable tension while examining the complexities of racial prejudice. An unbelievably gorgeous debut." Good Intentions’ is an expression that might epitomise Nur and we enjoy our time with him in this emotive, heartwarming, but also heartbreaking novel.What the book also does well is not let Nur off the hook for his behaviour. I mentioned that the way it ends is the only logical way, but there’s also this. Nur is repeatedly told that he is treating Yasmina badly, even though he continually shifts the blame on his family instead, and he’s not …babied (for want of another word) when it all goes wrong because of it. He has to take responsibility for it all.

Nolan agrees that this cultural shift has coincided with “a momentous, dramatic influx of young women”. But that’s because “it’s only relatively recent that you could have fiction written by a woman about intimate subjects like sex – and for it to be classed as literary fiction”. Rep: British Pakistani Muslim mc with depression and anxiety, British Sudanese Muslim li, British Sudanese Muslim side character with depression, British Pakistani Muslim gay side character, British Palestinian gay side character, British Pakistani Muslim side charactersHe was wary, he says, when writing Good Intentions, of building a narrative where “[Nur’s] parents are just racist, like, capital-R Racist”, when “it’s actually got a lot to do with how [Nur] perceives his parents.” Writing for me is such an intrinsic part of my life. Now, I’ve been doing it for so long I can’t not write. I’m always writing If you like reading books about complicated or unlikable human beings, Good Intentions is a great option as it is also layered, culturally and politically relevant, and thought-provoking.' The New Arab

Rhys Thomas: And how much of this book does stem from your own life? I know the geography is biographical. You’re from Birmingham as is the main character, and lived in Nottingham which is where he lives. Why is this? That same male publisher points to the Vintage promotion in particular, noting that almost all the editors in that division are female. (Of 19 editors commissioning fiction at Vintage, only four are men.) And this isn’t just one team in one company, he argues – it’s a gender balance replicated across the industry. (A diversity survey, released in February by the UK Publishers Association, had 64% of the publishing workforce as female with women making up 78% of editorial, 83% of marketing and 92% of publicity.) But Rob Doyle suggests that maybe having pariah status isn’t such a bad thing. “It strikes me that really good writing and great literature historically has not come from glory and triumph. It has come from abjection and opposition.”Ever fallen in love with messy, confusing consequences for everyone involved? Then Good Intentions is for you’ Stylist A love story full of hard choices and tensions, family obligations and racial prejudices. Not to be missed by fans of Modern Love." I really enjoyed the writing (the banter between the main leads, the descriptions of the food omg) such that I ended up tabbing way more than expected!! 😀 tbh this was going so well and I fully expected to give this 3.75-4 stars but the way the ending was executed and after sitting down and thinking through my feelings for the book again, I decided on 3.5 stars. What made this so upsetting was that it was created by someone inside the culture, the religion. This wasn’t a white man writing about us, this was one of us. An exploration of the ways that race and family ties may complicate or imperil romance even if everyone means well.

This wasn’t the only time I’d been let down like this. Aziz Ansari’s Netflix comedy Master of None left a bitter taste in my mouth. To watch Ansari’s character, modelled on himself, forego Islam, drink alcohol, eat bacon, and have sex only with white women, felt so unlike the life I had lived. I’m fascinated about relationships and the kind of weights that we place on them, and I think actually what I’m referring to is the sort of social contract of relationships, like, how much burden are we willing to accept before we accept that this is breaking?” he explains.

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Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex If we stop expecting the big male novelists of the 2020s to look like updated big male novelists of the 1980s, there are signs of an exciting new era of fiction by young men. This spring saw the publication of Caleb Azumh Nelson’s Open Water, while in the past year there have been critically acclaimed books from Gabriel Krauze, Sunjeev Sahota and Chris Power. Writers such as Nikesh Shukla, Luke Kennard, James Scudamore and Michael Donkor are hitting their stride, while Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, Bryan Washington and Paul Mendez are producing powerful fiction about queer desire. There are also poets such as Sam Riviere and Will Burns, whose debut novels are expected later this year. And in 2022, 4th Estate’s lead debut is Good Intentions by Kasim Ali, bought as part of a six-figure, two-book deal. Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative Futures A beautiful and honest story… from a fantastic new talent’ Sareeta Domingo, author of If I Don't Have You His mother, Hina, pats the seat on the sofa next to her, and Nur takes it, his father, Mahmoud, on the other side of him, and all sat there like that, they might strike an onlooker as the right kind of family. The right kind of brown family who have stayed up to watch the fireworks, waiting to see the celebration of the end of one Western year and the ringing in of a new one.