The Right Sort of Girl: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Oh, and if her mother and the aunties don't stop asking her when she's going to settle down and start having babies, Baby might just lose it. It might not be my religion but I appreciate parts of it and despite being so busy there is this calm to the temple and the pool that surrounds it!

It resulted in “second guessing what people wanted, always wanting to make sure that other people feel alright… and that comes from watching the women in my world facilitate everybody else before themselves”. The idea that Baby and Sid could track down the exact records, find (or not) the houses, the people, seemed unlikely to me. Rather than ask her mum and dadima about the letters, Baby decides to go on a voyage of discovery to India, to visit her parents' homeland and see what she can uncover. Discovering the secrets of the past helps Baby to join the dots in her own life, and gives her ‘steel’. She would feel embarrassed about eating certain foods and wearing cultural clothing but as she gets older she starts to embrace who she really is wearing her Indian clothing with pride.Although this is a fun take of the situation it will have hit home for many Asian readers in a way it won't for others.

Bradford born and bred, award-winning presenter Anita Rani is one of the most recognisable faces on British TV. And this little boy, I mean, it’s an amazing story, I’m not gonna give it away, because you need to read the book, but all the other sons tried to get the throne. As Baby learns more about the history of India, and the horror of Partition in 1947, she feels as though a previously stunted part of her has been given room to grow.The balance between the exploration of really serious issues and the comedy, humour and romance in this novel is pitch perfect – everything is beautifully and sensitively handled – and as well as exploring these important themes, and developing a great cast of well-realised characters, Anita Rani brilliantly and vividly creates a sense of place and community within this novel. I absolutely adored all the history in this book, both Baby’s family history and the section dealing with Partition. I could see so much of my own life in this book and at times it felt like parts of my life had been included in the story.

There will come a time when people of colour in the UK can just produce art rather than having to spend all our creative energy on explaining who we are and why we have a right to exist. On the scale that is used in Indian culture to compare individuals and where they should be in life, Baby is very behind. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site.I remember standing in that park at age 15 with my mother and raging at the injustice of it all, just like Baby. Baby Does A Runner is a brilliant story about Baby, or Simran; a British-born Sikh woman who is single, in her 30s and struggling a bit with not getting the same opportunities in life as her male counterparts at work, and with the loss of her father. Baby Does A Runner serves as a powerful reminder to South Asian women that we would not be here today were it not for the suffering and strength of our past generations.