Good Intentions: ‘Captivating and heartbreaking’ Stylist

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I wanted, too, to ask questions that I felt weren’t being asked. Of parents’ expectations of their children, of the way my culture can judge, of the way it can often feed into our very worst traits. I strove for authenticity above all. These characters], they are such good friends at the start, but then you realise they are quite poisonous to one another. But it’s all about that loyalty that you have to your childhood friends, even as you’re growing and changing.” 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.”

Compelling, emotionally honest, and unafraid of the gray areas of race, faith, sexuality, and love. Kasim Ali's debut Good Intentions shows how complicated relationships can be, even with the best of intentions." 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.

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Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director of one of the UK’s most important literary imprints, 4th Estate, insists men aren’t being discriminated against. However, she does believe there is “a predominance of white, middle-class cis women at all levels of the publishing industry”. Widyaratna thinks that certain “received ideas” do need to be challenged – not least the reliance on “comp titles”, the system by which publishers consider a submission by comparing it to other similar books. The most obvious example of this has been the Sally Rooney phenomenon – in which every publisher rushed to find young female writers to fill what one called the “Rooney-shaped hole”. There’s no ironic distance between the author and the protagonists, and the lengthy passages of dialogue feel like eavesdropping on a low-level argument between a couple at the next restaurant table. The general impression is that, with solid jobs and homes out of reach, these earnest millennials have vastly over-invested in relationships, and that carries its own poignancy.' The Financial Times

Nagging parents who believe marriage is the most important thing in the world; a disillusioned South Asian Muslim man who wants to escape his culture; a white love interest who represents Western freedom. But I think we should be wary of shaming the women whose enthusiasm, passion and investment keeps the whole industry afloat. And there is also the question of whether for all their visibility, women are yet afforded the same cultural respect as the male novelist. There’s a danger that the novel gets dismissed as a feminised form, especially since the history of the novel, from its 18th-century origins, was rooted in the idea of it as frivolous literature for leisured women who didn’t receive a formal education in science or politics. It was male writers such as Samuel Richardson, as well as a generation of male critics, who were seen to professionalise fiction writing.

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Nur!” comes a shout from the living room. His mother’s voice, urgent. “It’s about to begin! Come down!” Nur loves how she gets so excited about something that could so easily become mundane to other people, the same year in, year out. He loves that she makes them all sit there, her husband and their three children, in a family tradition crafted from something that only she truly enjoys.

When Zauner’s mother dies, she feels she’s losing ties to her parent’s Korean heritage. In an endeavour both to reconnect to that heritage and to honour her mother, she remembers the Korean food of her childhood. Through memories of her sometimes troubled relationship with her mother, including a sustained period of estrangement, Zauner explores themes of cultural dissonance and diaspora, producing a raw and tender portrayal of grief. Good Intentions is a magnificent and messy love story that broke my heart. Bittersweet and tender, Ali writes about modern day relationships with such compassion. This is a novel for anyone who has ever known what it is to be conflicted in falling in love, feeling the expectations of our families but also ourselves." Absorbing, compelling, and beautifully written . Its ending brought me close to tears." —Beth O'Leary, bestselling author of The Flatshare It's the countdown to midnight on New Year's Eve and Nur is steeling himself to tell his parents that he's seeing someone. A young British Pakistani man, Nur has spent years omitting details about his personal life to maintain his image as the golden eldest child. And it's come at a cost.You should have taken some more time off,” his father says. “It’s nice having you home, makes it feel like it used to.” This is a complex, tender and bittersweet love story that interrogates familial obligation, religion, race, what it means to be “good”– and specifically, what it means to be “good” to each other.' The Skinny Which is perhaps why many women feel suspicious that the “where are all the men?” conversation too often goes hand-in-hand with the question: is the novel dead? Byers says there is certainly an authority attached to being a man in his profession. In interviews and talks, he is constantly invited to grandstand on politics or the craft of fiction in a way that his female contemporaries aren’t. Too often, he says, women are expected to write about and discuss their personal lives. Moving, modern and utterly engaging. What a talent’ Rhik Samadder, author of I Never Said I Love You

Good news for readers is that it’s unlikely to be the last we hear from Ali. For a début novelist, it would be an understatement to call the 28-year-old prolific. Good Intentions was his 22nd novel, after he wrote a staggering 21 in the seven years between the ages of 17 and 24. “I’m writing another one now,” he laughs. “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.” The only outlier to this trend, Brown suggested, is the Irish writer Rob Doyle, whose second novel, Threshold (2020), is by his own description a “gloves-off, messy exploration of my own damaged male psyche and masculinity itself”. But Doyle believes that as a male novelist writing honestly about sex, “You’re kind of despised. It can feel a bit like having some weird contagion, that you ring a bell when you come into town, and people can clear out.” A generation ago the shortlists were dominated by men: the “big beasts” of the 80s and 90s. Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro et al in the UK and Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow in the US. The writers we considered our leading novelists were men. This has changed, and while it is almost universally accepted with publishing that the current era of female dominance is positive – not to mention overdue and necessary, considering the previous 6,000 or so years of male cultural hegemony – there are, increasingly, dissenting voices among publishers, agents and writers. They feel that men – and especially young men – are being shut out of an industry that is blind to its own prejudices. A love story full of hard choices and tensions, family obligations and racial prejudices. Not to be missed by fans of Modern Love’ Vogue IndiaI read The Santanic Verses despite my mum’s anger (because the book is against Islam) and I was angry he did that because, along with the obvious, he’s a very good writer. So yeah, I guess it comes from being frustrated that I can only think of those two. this showed the more ugly side of love, and had a not overly positive ending, but that added to uniqueness of the narrative. the flaws of the people, especially nur, weren’t brushed aside - they had consequences, and that was a thing i enjoyed seeing. A little away from that plot point, I also liked how this book discussed mental health and homophobia. Nur and Hawa both have depression (and Nur anxiety as well) and I thought it was good how it showed that symptoms eased and got worse throughout. Perhaps I would say I’d have liked there to be some discussion of therapy—be that psychological or biological—but I did also like that the book was about characters with mental illnesses but wasn’t about the mental illnesses specifically. With regard to the homophobia, that was more peripheral, but I thought was still dealt with well. I never felt like the book was trying to cover too many topics here—they were all given time and space to be discussed and with nuance.