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. I really enjoyed the writing (the banter between the main leads, the descriptions of the food omg) such that I ended up tabbing way more than expected!! 😀 tbh this was going so well and I fully expected to give this 3.75-4 stars but the way the ending was executed and after sitting down and thinking through my feelings for the book again, I decided on 3.5 stars. Rhys Thomas: And how much of this book does stem from your own life? I know the geography is biographical. You’re from Birmingham as is the main character, and lived in Nottingham which is where he lives.

This book had drama, and a lot of it. Relationship dynamics are hard, and Kasim Ali emphasized this throughout the book, giving the reader different situations that feel so human and real that just make you want to stay for the ride. Update, November 24th: Local campaigner Joe Powell has been selected as the Labour candidate for Kensington. Kasim Ali launched his campaign earlier this month in a social media post. Ali is deputy leader of the Labour group on Kensington and Chelsea Council and has served as a councillor since 2019, representing Dalgarno ward. He is currently chair of the council’s housing and communities committee. Outside of politics, Ali does research for universities on global prosperity. He came to the UK as a refugee from Somalia while he was a teenager and has lived and worked in Kensington throughout his adult life. Ali has been endorsed by ASLEF and the Socialist Health Association.

Yet, we also tend to underestimate our parents — a theme Ali highlights in his book. “Sometimes we talk about our parents as being a product of their time and their environment — we think that we have all these ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ ideas of the world and that our parents are not going to be accepting of those opinions,” explains Ali. “I really wanted to talk about the difference in politics between our parents and us and the gap between those dimensions, but I also really wanted to talk about giving our parents a chance to change with us.” Representing modern and multidimensional Muslims Like my characters, I am a Muslim who doesn’t pray as often as he should but still considers himself to be a Muslim. My family are Muslims like this. My friends are Muslims like this. We are not people who find Islam restrictive and walk away from it; we find ourselves in it. It will always be important to me to represent that in the work I create, not only because it means others like me can see themselves but also so that non-Muslims can see people like us, too. Lucie Shorthouse, Juliette Motamed, Sarah Kameela Impey and Faith Omole in We Are Lady Parts (Photo: Laura Radford/Channel 4) A love story full of hard choices and tensions, family obligations and racial prejudices. Not to be missed by fans of Modern Love." Kasim Ali works at Penguin Random House and has previously been shortlisted for Hachette’s Mo Siewcherran Prize, longlisted for the 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and has contributed to THE GOOD JOURNAL. He comes from Birmingham and lives in London.

Kensington (and its predecessor, Kensington and Chelsea) was the constituency of choice for Tory grandees Michael Portillo and Malcolm Rifkind, who both lost their previous seats at the 1997 election. Portillo was elected in Kensington and Chelsea in a by-election in 1999 and was succeeded by Rifkind in 2005 (who at the intervening general election had tried unsuccessfully to be re-elected in Edinburgh Pentlands). Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. He earned a BA and MA from the University at Albany-SUNY and an MFA from New York University. The book ends on such a 360 degree note and I still do not understand what the hell happened. But yeah it also make sense, Because the main character was kind of unhinged. He wishes he could stay here, not in the house itself but closer than where he is now. That he didn’t have to travel for two hours to get home to see them, that he could be around his family more often. I saw a post in a Facebook group about nurses having to wear face masks for 13-hour shifts and getting blisters,” she says. “It sounded horrific and I wanted to do something.A judge said the ex-North Manchester General Hospital worker ‘effectively sentenced himself’ after throwing his career away and ‘disgracing’ his family. So I’m making ear defenders that make wearing masks more comfortable. At first I made them out of document folders – I cleared out B&M in Sunderland! – then I found a template from a designer in America.” Ever fallen in love with messy, confusing consequences for everyone involved? Then Good Intentions is for you' Stylist You have lost your career, suffered public humiliation and been met with disapproval from your close knit community. Giles Nelson, prosecuting, said Ali had been dealing drugs between April 2016 and his final arrest in November 2017, supplying ‘a busy market here in Worcester’ across county lines. He described it as ‘a serious commercial operation’ and said, in Ali’s case, there was ‘a pattern of persistence’.

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. This sentence is predicated largely on the fact you have essentially sentenced yourself. Read More Related Articles This interest in relationships and their complexity is something he is taking into his next novel. The second book in the same deal as Good Intentions, which was snapped up for a six-figure sum in 2020—after Ali wrote the novel over six weeks in 2019—is, Ali says, a book about a toxic friendship spanning 10 years. Since Riz Ahmed delivered that speech in Parliament in 2017, since he created the “Riz test”, a sort-of Bechdel test for Muslims, I have noticed a shift. Recently, I watched Ramy, an American sitcom by Ramy Youssef about a young Muslim in New Jersey. The show depicts Ramy trying to become stronger in his faith, and has honest conversations about how hard that can be.

'General manager' of drug dealing enterprise Kasim Ali jailed as part of Operation Blade

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. Good Intentions" follows the story of the relationship between Nur, a young British-Pakistani man, and Yasmin, a young British-Sudanese woman. Nur and Yasmina are in love. They've been together for four happy years. But Nur's parents don't know that Yasmina exists. It delves into their relationship, racism in the community and the familial ties. Feeling the family pressures on choosing the right woman and keeping up family traditions of letting his parents be involved in who he chooses to marry, Nur keeps Yasmina a secret for 4 years, not even telling his parents they are living together. This ultimately has its repercussions on both Yasmina and his family. I was really interested to see how this would unfold. As mentioned, I didn't really like the way the ending was executed but I was satisfied with where Yasmina and Nur's relationship went.

What the book also does well is not let Nur off the hook for his behaviour. I mentioned that the way it ends is the only logical way, but there’s also this. Nur is repeatedly told that he is treating Yasmina badly, even though he continually shifts the blame on his family instead, and he’s not …babied (for want of another word) when it all goes wrong because of it. He has to take responsibility for it all. Rachel pays for all the materials -herself. “I’m happy I can do something to help,” she says. “It’s not the most obvious thing people would think of, but the template is out there to use, and if I can make nurses’ lives a bit easier, I’m happy.”I miss having you here,” his mother says, and a sharp guilt pierces Nur. Even now, after all these years living apart from his family, he still feels it. It’s impossible not to. Kasim Ali, whose début novel Good Intentions was published by Fourth Estate in March this year, is talking about “Pachinko”, the “incredible”, he says, Apple TV+ drama series based on the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee. Kasim Ali: In Britain, I seem to be one of the only male Muslim debuts in 2022 from a big and traditional publisher. There are around 3.5 million Muslims in Britain right now, so how are there so few? Obviously, there’s going to be more of us out there writing, but why are they not getting published? There’s clearly a barrier somewhere. Off the top of my head, the only very famous male Muslim writers from the UK I can think of are Mohsin Hamid, and Salman Rushdie. And like, Salman Rushdie … I don’t want him on my team, man. Once considered a true-blue constituency, Labour candidate Emma Dent Coad caused a major upset by winning Kensington in 2017 – becoming the first Labour MP to represent the constituency. Kensington was then the second most marginal Conservative gain from Labour in the 2019 general election, when Tory candidate Felicity Buchan took the seat by just 150 votes.