Novel
The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi · 1990
Synopsis
Karim Amir, seventeen, the mixed-race son of an Indian immigrant, is bored in the suburbs of south London in the seventies and dreams of leaving; he calls himself English by birth, or nearly so. His father Haroon, a drab minor civil servant, is suddenly adopted by fashionable London society, eager for the exotic, which makes him its guru, a Buddha in whom neither he nor his son believes. For Karim, an unexpected opening comes in the theatre, and with it the city.
Context
Faber and Faber published the book in 1990, with a cover by Peter Blake; it was its author's first novel, and in 1993 the BBC made a four-episode series from it, with music composed by David Bowie. Christian Bourgois published the French translation in 1991, by Michel Courtois-Fourcy, and reissued it in 2022. Susie Thomas stresses that in 1990 there was almost no English novel about the childhood of a mixed-race boy.
Who it is for
In English, translated into French by Christian Bourgois; a first-person coming-of-age novel, steeped in pop music.
Prizes and reception
Whitbread Prize for best first novel in 1990; in 2009 the journal Wasafiri placed it among the twenty-five most influential books of the previous twenty-five years.