Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

'It is solid, well argued, filled with ideas and insights, and the product of many years of research.' - Bruce King, World Literature Today 'A long overdue survey of the wealth of British Asian diaspora writing, which not only identifies the main trends in such writing, but also looks closely at the work of a broad range of major and less well-known figures.' - John Thieme, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 'As a complex critical engagement with important - famous and neglected - texts of the South Asian diaspora in Britain, Home Truths remains an immensely enabling study and one that can be recommended wholeheartedly to students and teachers.' - Tabish Khair, Wasasfiri 'Nasta's ability to explicate different positions within the literary aesthetics of South-Asian diaspora writing in Britain as a whole, makes her book particularly valuable for postgraduate researchers and teachers of South-Asian literature. It provides a lucid, practical overview of a subject that resists simple definitions and is, by its very nature, 'discontinuous and frequently involve[s] a doubling of vision' and 'accountable to more than one location'.' - Modernism and Modernity, Alex Tickell

This text seeks to place individual works of now world famous writers within a diverse tradition of im/migrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the World War II, and locates their work within an historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations.The figure of the disaporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen as the 'Everyman' of the late modern period, a symbol of the global and the local, a cultural traveller who can traverse the national, political and ethnic boundaries of the new millennium. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain seeks not only to place the individual works of now world famous writers such as VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon or Hanif Kureishi within a diverse tradition of im/migrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the Second World War, but also locates their work, as well as many lesser known writers such as Attia Hosain, GV Desani, Aubrey Menen, Ravinder Randhawa and Romesh Gunesekera within a historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations and derives from long established indigenous traditions as well as colonial and post-colonial visions of 'home' and 'abroad'. Close critical readings combine with a historical and theoretical overview in this first book to chart the crucial role played by writers of South Asian origin in the belated acceptance of a literary poetics of black and Asian writing in Britain today.