Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan (William Morrow) ~Janet Brown

When Mira and Tahliil fall in love, they come together as strangers in the most profound way. Not only are they from different continents, they're both submerged in a liminal state on a cold and gloomy island, in a city that contains a multiplicity of cultures. Leicester, England is one of the world's most diverse metropolises, one in which those whose families have known no other country for generations are in the minority. 

"Where are all the English people?" When Mira disembarks from the first airplane journey of her life to begin her life in an arranged marriage, this is her predominate thought as she's driven to her new home. The "chaotic jumbles" of shops are "familiar in ways she hasn't anticipated" with women scurrying past wearing saris and Punjabi suits. She's taken to a house that she and her husband will share with his parents, one that's much smaller than her family's home in Ahmedabad. Yet within its walls, domestic life is completely Indian, with her mother-in-law and Mira herself cooking food from the Subcontinent and performing all the domestic tasks. Mira plans to put her diploma in "beauty therapy" to use until a neighbor tells her every girl who arrives from India has one of those. Bored, she finds a job in an Indian dessert shop where she repeatedly encounters a man who works in the adjacent grocery store. Without friends and married to a husband whom she barely knows and rarely sees, Mira welcomes the possibility of making a friend of her own,

Tahliil is in Leicester because his mother lives there, although she's a woman he hasn't seen for fifteen years. Political turmoil in Somalia has brought him and his sister to England, in a journey by boat that’s left both of them with memories they struggle to bury. Making their way through the process of gaining political asylum, they're forbidden to work. While his sister stays home, Tahliil has three part-time “under the table” jobs and no life of his own. His English is flawed and he's lonely. Then he meets a young woman who works in an Indian dessert shop, someone whom he runs into often. at first by accident, then by design.

Both Mira and Tahliil are caged by family obligations. Not only does Mira's husband refuse to leave his parents' home, her visa status is linked to her marriage. If she leaves her husband, she loses her right to live in England. Tahliil is the primary support for his mother and sister, financially and emotionally. Still he and Mira take refuge in a friendship through text messages, falling into an attraction and then a love affair that's as inexorable as it is impossible.

Immigration is an issue that's often discussed and rarely understood. On one side, there's the old Leicester resident who tells Tahliil "These days when you look around, it's hard to tell that we're in England at all." On the other, homesick strangers have "given themselves over to a foreign land, foreign people," fighting loneliness any way they can.

Manish Chauhan says, "I grew up in Leicester – one of the first “super diverse” cities in England where minorities make up the majority. My school photographs show a sea of brown faces, and for many years I believed Leicester to be a blueprint of England, perhaps even the wider world." 

Perhaps someday it shall be.