Corner Shop
A Novel
-
-
4.3 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting your heart's desire - and the other? Getting it. Fourteen-year-old Lucky Khalil loves three things: football, Star Wars and Portia, the girl who works in his grandfather's corner shop. In that order. But Lucky has a destiny – worse than a destiny, he has a dream. He dreams that one day, his lucky left foot will win the World Cup for England . It torments him, because it tastes real, because when he wakes he weeps with disappointment that it is just a dream.
Meanwhile, Lucky's mother Delphine seems to have had all her dreams come true. But Delphine feels increasingly trapped in her apparently perfect marriage and gilded lifestyle. She fantasizes about rediscovering the freedom of her youth, but rekindling a relationship with her maverick father-in-law, Zaki, is only going to end in disaster.
Zaki, a charming gambler who loved and lost Delphine long before she married his sensible and successful son, feels equally trapped in the corner shop that he has unwillingly run for years for his family's sake. He wonders whether the time has come to abandon his middle class responsibilities, to try once more to achieve his own long-forgotten dreams.
As each of the Khalils discovers in Roopa Farooki's beautifully written and richly layered tale, the closer one's dreams become, the more risk there is of losing sight of what really matters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aspirations and family ties play out across three generations of the Khalil family in Farooki's fine new novel (after Bitter Sweets). Lucky Khalil is a talented young soccer player with his sights set on taking the World Cup home for England. His father, Jinan, is the serious-minded, hard-working son of a Pakistani immigrant, married to Delphine, a modern-day Madame Bovary who's longing for a more romantic, less ordinary existence. The patriarch of the Khalil family, Zaki, is a shopkeeper and gambler with wanderlust and an attraction to his son's wife. When Delphine gives in to Zaki's advances, family bonds are stretched to the breaking point. As the characters make inroads on their ambitions, the cross-purposes of their desires and responsibilities threaten to crush the family. This complex saga can be challenging to follow through its shifting points-of-view, but it's worth the ride for the flawed yet likable cast who question what, exactly, leads to a more fulfilled life. This character- and culture-rich novel will appeal to Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith fans looking for quainter fare.
