Sofia Khan is Not Obliged - Ayisha Malik

Sofia has recently decided to commit to a life of celibacy. Her sister is due to get married, one of her best friends is about to marry a man who already has another wife, and her family just will not stop badgering her about when it's going to be her turn. But she's just broken up with her boyfriend, who wanted her to move in with his interfering family. One day, after an unfortunate incident on a London Underground train, she finds herself commissioned to write a book about Muslim Dating...

It's unusual to find a protagonist in mainstream fiction these days with a strong religious faith (of any religion.) If you do, it's either downplayed, showing the characters indistinguishable from anyone else but for a few words or rituals. And when religion is explored in depth it tends towards an anguished crisis of faith. And in particular, Islam gets fogged to the outside view by ignorance, misinformation and fear. Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged shows us an insider's view, an ordinary British Muslim whose faith is an integral part of her life. She chooses to wear the hijab (much to the dismay of her mother) and her working life brings its own challenges in finding a quiet place to pray five times a day. She is also loud, stubborn, witty, likeable and intelligent, an occasional smoker and lover of lemon puffs and chocolate hobnobs - a likeable and relatable character.

I picked up Sofia Khan at work when unpacking the new books delivery, and knew after looking through a few pages that I had to buy it. By the time Sofia shouts at a racist about terrorists not wearing vintage shoes, she had become real to me: I could see her, hear her voice, I needed to know her story. Despite her determination to stay single, Sofia ventures out into the dating world for "research" for her book, with its perils and pitfalls. But the most significant relationships come into her life through other means: the American with whom she has a hilarious bantering chemistry, the former fiance returns, and then there is a slower-building friendship that may become something else. Given the genre - the romantic comedy - it's inevitable that Sofia will find love somewhere, but it is not a straight-forward conclusion. Along the way, Sofia falls under pressure to please her family who just want to see her happily married, but is she making the right choices, and if not, how will she know?

Sofia Khan is a cheerful read, and had me giggling every few pages, but also made me feel for her sorrows and dilemmas in her quest to find happiness for her friends and family as well as for herself. She doesn't always make the right decisions, and with mistakes come consequences that are not easily brushed away. Sofia's family might not understand her choices, but what they do have, beneath the bickering and nagging, is love, which shines through the inter-generational conflict, in a wonderfully rounded and believable cast of characters. My only complaint about this book is that one of the promising new friends was written out of the story about halfway through and barely warrants a mention afterwards. But there were so many other great characters to spend the rest of the book with.  I came away from this book feeling as though I'd made a lot of new friends in the Khan family, and in Sofia's closest circle, Hannah, Fozia and Suj, Katie at work, and Conall (not Colin!) the grump next door who has hidden depths.

I'm really excited for Sofia Khan, which I'm hoping will be one of 2016's big debuts. It's been chosen by WH Smith travel stores as part of their Fresh Talent promotion, so this ought to help to make the book one of the big new hits of 2016. I want to get people reading and talking about Ayisha Malik and Sofia Khan, and good news - there is a sequel in the works. I can't wait to see what happens next.

You can read an interview with Ayisha Malik about Sofia Khan at the New Statesman here.

The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory

I was lent The White Queen and The Red Queen by a colleague, and although they work well as stand-alone novels, I think they work best when read as a pair. After following the changing fortunes and loyalties of the House of York during the Wars of the Roses, it is interesting to witness the same era from the point of view of the enemy; the house of Tudor and of Lancaster. Through her Lancastrian characters, Gregory offers alternative interpretations of events and the motivations of the players. Those people we've come to know as friends, now become enemies, traitors, whose actions and motives become suspicious when seen from a distance.

We first meet Margaret Beaufort, the narrator and titular Red Queen, as a very young child. Margaret is a precocious child, strongly religious and very self-assured, convinced that God is calling her to be a nun. Her mother, however has other plans. Margaret is to marry into the Tudor family and bear a possible heir to the throne. She is a lonely girl, married at the age of twelve, a widowed mother at thirteen, and it is made quite clear to her that she is unloved. Despite her certainty - bordering on arrogance - that she is destined for greatness, her mother makes it quite clear that the only thing that Margaret can do that is of any importance whatsoever, is to give birth to the King of England. So, once she has accepted her lot, that is what Margaret will do. Her son will be king; he must.

Philippa Gregory's novels are characterised by their depiction of strong women who have shaped history, but more often than not behind the scenes and neglected by historians. Both Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen, are fiercely committed to their cause, ruthless and ambitious to the exclusion of all other concerns, sometimes more than the men. But while Elizabeth was fiery, driven by her love of her family and her need for vengeance on those who have harmed her and hers, Margaret's nature is cold and sometimes cruel. She is driven by her certainty that the throne is hers by right and that any means are justified by the end: not just for her good, or for the good of her house or even the country, but because it is divine will. I found Margaret to be an interesting, but unlikeable person, and once again I just wanted to cry, "Stop! How can it possibly be worth all the bloodshed?"

The White Queen, Philippa Gregory

Your house's emblem should not be the white rose but the old sign of eternity [...] the snake which eats itself. The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.

It was interesting to read Philippa Gregory's The White Queen last week, in the run-up to the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton. The White Queen also opens with a royal wedding between King Edward IV York, to Elizabeth Woodville, a beautiful young widow of the opposing house of Lancaster.

Not for Edward and Elizabeth is there a carriage ride watched by billions, months of hype, houses draped in flags and bunting and a Knit Your Own Royal Wedding book published especially for the occasion. Edward and Elizabeth's marriage takes place in haste and in secrecy before the latest battle in the War of the Roses, before a handful of witnesses. After the event, Elizabeth's brother casts doubt on the validity of the marriage, witnessed by three women and a young boy, and warns her that it would be easy for the King to claim that he had never been legally married and prove it all to be a ploy to get Elizabeth into his bed.

Ms Gregory demonstrates this marriage to be a whole-family affair. There is not just a new queen, but her whole family becomes embroiled in politics at a very turbulent time. Philippa Gregory shows a different side to the story from that of the history books, focusing on the role of the women behind the scenes. From the moment of her marriage, Elizabeth has to keep her wits about her at all times, as she gets mixed up in a world of scheming and treachery, obsessive ambition and murder, in a seemingly endless cycle of revenge. Elizabeth describes how her rival, Margaret of Anjou, "will not accept her defeat, she will plot and scheme for her son, just as Edward told me, that I must plot and scheme for ours. She will never stop until she is back in England and the battle is drawn up again. She will never stop until her husband is dead, her son is dead, and she has no one left to put on the throne. This is what it means to be Queen of England in this country today." But once Margaret of Anjou has ceased to be a threat, new claimants for the throne rise. As described in the quote at the top of the page, when there are no threats to Edward's rule from outside his house, his own brothers turn against him and each other, and with each betrayal, Elizabeth vows vengeance. The book paints a bitter picture of how unforgiveness destroys and is never satisfied.

The White Queen is set earlier than Gregory's usual era (The Tudors) and I confess I have little memory of my history lessons before the resolution of the war covered in this novel - see the first episode of Blackadder to see how that might or might not have turned out. I also found it a little confusing for the sheer number of people named Edward and Richard, and the different names and titles of other characters. But once I got my head around who was who, I was fascinated by the twists and turns, the to-and--fro of the houses' fortunes, culminating in the disappearance of Elizabeth's sons to King Edward, well-known as "the Princes in the Tower." Being a historical novel based upon real people, it is difficult to work out how much of the story is true and how much is speculation, although Gregory's note at the back explains some of her decisions for the direction of the plot. With conflicting theories and sources available to her, Gregory had to choose her own theories about the most likely truth, although she does not provide any definite answer.

Philippa Gregory has written a companion novel: The Red Queen, from the perspective of the "other side:" Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor.

Rachel's Holiday, Marian Keyes

"They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no." Amy Winehouse

Rachel's Holiday comes as a result of a mistake. Sure, Rachel Walsh takes drugs socially, but everyone does it in her circle of sophisticated friends in New York, it doesn't mean she's an addict. And yes, she understands that it looks like she attempted suicide when she had to be taken into hospital to get her stomach pumped, but really she was just buzzing and couldn't get to sleep so she just kept on taking sleeping pills to help, but not before jotting down a few ideas for poems which, okay, if you look at the notes out of context could possibly be construed as a "goodbye, cruel world" sort of message if you squint enough, but really, it's all just a huge misunderstanding and she's sure that it can all be sorted out.

But her parents send her goody-too-shoes sister Margaret over to bring her home to Ireland and check her into the Cloisters, a rehabilitation centre. Oh, well, Rachel needed a holiday anyway. She could do with a bit of aromatherapy and saunas and general pampering while everyone else got their heads sorted out. But when she gets to the Cloisters, it's not the swanky health spa she expected. Not only does she have to share a room - if you can call it that and not a broom cupboard - with an over-talkative older lady, but there are no saunas, no swimming pools, Rachel is expected to help with the housework and spend her days in group therapy having her childhood poked and picked at by an aggressive nun named Josephine. And no drugs at all. Not even for the people like Rachel who don't have any actual problems with them.

I was given Rachel's Holiday at a World Book Night, by a young lady who had "expected it to be a bit chicky, but it wasn't." It is an easy read, written in short chapters and compelling enough to ensure that I zipped through the 600+ pages in a day and a night, but it is not fluff. I realise that my understanding of "chick lit" is still a rather derogatory one of shoes, sex and shopping, no doubt influenced by Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series. Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday is easy to read, women's fiction but it is not fluff. There is a good mix of humour and pathos as we get to understand Rachel and the other people in the Cloisters, all going through very different situations and yet facing the same personal problems and daily temptations.

You can tell from the start that Rachel is an unreliable narrator - she doth protest too much. At first she downplays her actions, failing to mention the full extent of her drugs habit and the means she must go to in order to keep it up. We begin to learn the truth through other people's reactions, for example, Rachel describes herself as a big girl, but when she arrives back in Ireland, people remark how skinny she is - a comment that goes over Rachel's head but not the reader's. Despite her deep denial, constant shirking of all responsibility for herself or others and self-absorption, I really liked Rachel. Whether I would have liked her if the story had been told through another person's eyes, or by a third person narrator, is another matter. I suspect not. But as it was, I felt for her when it finally hits home to her how far she's fallen. As she makes the effort to get her life back on track, not always succeeding but trying again, I really feel for her and want her to succeed and make a good life for herself. An enjoyable, lightish read with plenty of substance and a decided lack of shoe shopping.