Brown Baby
A Memoir of Race, Family and Home
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Brown Baby
Narrated by:
Himesh Patel
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Himesh Patel
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By:
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Nikesh Shukla
About this listen
'Brown Baby is a beautifully intimate and soul-searching memoir. It speaks to the heart and the mind and bears witness to our turbulent times.' - Bernardine Evaristo
How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is racist, sexist and facing climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer?
In Brown Baby, Nikesh Shukla explores themes of racism, feminism, parenting and our shifting ideas of home. This memoir, by turns heartwrenching, hilariously funny and intensely relatable, is dedicated to the author’s two young daughters, and serves as an act of remembrance to the grandmother they never had a chance to meet. Through love, grief, food and fatherhood, Shukla shows how it’s possible to believe in hope.
This audiobook contains exclusive extracts from the 'Brown Baby' podcast, including interviews with guests such as Nadiya Hussein, Jay Sean and Kit de Waal.
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Critic reviews
Brown Baby is a beautifully intimate and soul-searching memoir. It speaks to the heart and the mind and bears witness to our turbulent times. (Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other)
Brown Baby is the funniest, saddest, most motivating memoir I have ever read - it's like a clever friend in your ear. A life-changing, heartbreaking, fizz-popping book that fills me with joy and gratitude and communion.
So honest, I found myself, engulfed, consumed. I could feel myself in the room with Nikesh.
A masterpiece ... Exquisitely written and so empowering, this is the book on fatherhood I have been waiting to read my whole life. I cannot begin to describe the whirlwind of emotions I experienced while reading the elegant vulnerability captured in these tender words ... I know that I will read this love letter of a book often, it has become an old friend that I take with me everywhere.
A wise and wonderful book from the hugely talented Nikesh Shukla. Written for his daughters, inspired by his mother whom they never got to meet, this love letter to his brown babies encompasses fatherhood, feminism, racial politics, growing up and being a grown up, with tenderness, depth and humour.
Brown Baby is fizzing with humanity, life and light. Nikesh Shukla has written page after page of golden prose that made me laugh out loud and weep real tears. Love, family, grief, race and gender are all nurtured carefully with intention and hope in this urgently relevant 21st century memoir.
An unforgettable love letter that stretches into both the past and the future, aching with longing and loss, firecracker humour, fury at the wrongs of the world but, above all, great beauty, pride and hope. Heartbreaking and brilliant.
Brown Baby is a heartbreakingly honest exploration of grief, loss, and what it means to belong. Shukla’s vulnerability is deeply moving; this memoir will stay with me for a long time.
Brown Baby is a gorgeous love letter from a father to his daughter. It is also a raw and necessary reckoning with the forces that shape the way we view ourselves and others. In this way, it is a love letter to us all, by turns hilarious, scathing, searching, and tender. Truly, Brown Baby is a treasure.
I’m awestruck by its intimacy and how densely packed with important questions it is.
[Brown Baby] has wisdom about being an ally I will remember for life, some of the best male writing about eating and emotional pain I have ever come across and is one of the very best examples of a story which is deeply personal feeling truly universal.
Funny, moving and utterly relevant to where we’re at right now, do not miss this beautiful book (Best new non-fiction for 2021, Stylist)
A brave, funny and rather lovely read. (Best books coming out in 2021, iNews)
Part state of the nation tract, part love letter to his family – the personal and political are fused in this masterpiece. (Nish Kumar)
As a parent, I was touched at his observations of his baby, his little girl, his curious daughter asking questions of the world and pushing for what she sees to be the 'right' way to be. Her black-and-white and often reactive worldview is sometimes sad (girls are nurses not doctors, there aren't brown faces like hers in books) and contrasts poignantly with the life lessons her dad tries to teach her.
It's an ode to parenting, to the beauty of childhood. To mothers. To family. While also being firmly about race and sexual equality and raising a child (of any race) in a confusing bombardment of stereotypes and perceived perfections.
Shukla is an author I've already read and admired, and I loved the style used here for the book. It isn't quite sequential but there is logic to the structure, I loved hearing him to talk his daughter. And opening up to readers at the same time about his ongoing grief for his mother, his feelings about the father that 'raised' him so different to himself, his own experiences as a parent.
For readers of any race and gender, for parents and non-parents, this is a provocative and stimulating autobiography-observation. Himesh Patel narrates this wonderfully, encapsulating the bittersweet and the loving.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.
Biography/father's letter to his daughter
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A fantastic book
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hmmmm
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very personal and honest
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