UNIMAGINED: A Muslim Boy Meets the West by Imran Ahmad

Aurum £12.99 pp280

A Muslim boy, growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s, puzzles over the contradictions between his Islamic upbringing and the everyday world of school, friends and television that surrounds him. The first half of Ahmad’s memoir, written in a faux-naive style perfectly suited to encounters with junior con-artists intent on tricking him out of his Tarzan bubble-gum cards or well-meaning but obtuse RI teachers who want to tell him about Jesus, is charming and often funny. The style is less successful when he grows up and goes to university in Stirling. Difficulties with girls (he’s good at infatuation, less good at communicating with those who inspire his puppy love) are followed by difficulties with religion. Could the evangelical Christians on campus be right in claiming that all Muslims are doomed to hellfire? The self-presentation as bewildered innocent begins to grate. There is a good story of cultural misunderstandings and latent racism in modern Britain lurking beneath the second half of this book, but Ahmad’s guileless narrative voice never allows it to emerge.

THE AFTERLIFE by Donald Antrim

Little, Brown £15.99 pp218

Memoirs in which American writers attempt to free themselves from the chains of spectacularly dysfunctional families are ten a penny. Very few indeed have the intelligence and grace of Antrim’s remarkable, impressionistic account of his relationship with his mother. Louanne Antrim was a woman who, in her son’s words, “lived her life inviting death”. Chain-smoking, alcoholic and subject to an assortment of delusions that ranged from the belief that she was the reincarnation of a Roman galley slave to the conviction that her own mother had once tried to drown her in a pond, she cannot have been an easy woman to love or understand. Other writers might have been tempted to claim that, after a long and painful struggle, they had come to some kind of final truth about their upbringing. Antrim does not. Aware of the shifting unreliability of memory, he presents a series of vignettes from his past that gradually construct a provisional portrait of his mother (and of himself) that is all the more moving in its refusal to lay claim to finality.

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