Brown Baby

Author Nikesh Shukla
Narrator Himesh Patel
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Publish Date 4 February 2021
Run Time 8 hours and 12 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Autobiography: writers, Child care and upbringing: advice for parents, Coping with death and bereavement, Feminism and feminist theory, Intergenerational relationships: advice and issues, Memoirs, Migration, immigration and emigration, Mixed heritage / mixed race groups or people, Social discrimination and equal treatment.

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What to expect

'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.

Critics Review

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.

Emma Jane Unsworth

So honest, I found myself, engulfed, consumed. I could feel myself in the room with Nikesh.

Nadiya Hussain

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.

Nikita Gill

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.

Meera Syal

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.

Deborah Frances-White, The Guilty Feminist

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.

Rachel Edwards

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.

Louise O’ Neill

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.

Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did The Damage

I’m awestruck by its intimacy and how densely packed with important questions it is.

Anoushka Shankar

[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.

Alexandra Heminsley

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

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