Brown Baby

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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

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