Selected by a distinguished independent panel of experts including our editorial expert, Julia Eccleshare, for Diverse Voices - 50 of the best Children's Books celebrating cultural diversity in the UK.
This highly personal story was partly influenced by Bali Rai's own experiences, it looks at the impact cultural traditions can have on young people growing up in modern times and the book will resonate with all who have experienced the pressure of expectation at the hands of their family.
Reissued in Penguin's ORIGINALS series of powerful teenage fiction.
MANNY WANTS TO BE A FOOTBALLER. OR A POP STAR. OR WRITE A BESTSELLER. HE DOESN'T WANT TO GET MARRIED...
'Harry and Ranjit were waiting for me - waiting to take me to Derby, to a wedding. My wedding. A wedding that I hadn't asked for, that I didn't want. To a girl who I didn't know... If they had bothered to open their eyes, they would have seen me: seventeen, angry, upset but determined - determined to do my own thing, to choose my own path in life...'
Set partly in the UK and partly in the Punjab region of India, this is a fresh, bitingly perceptive and totally up-to-the-minute look at one young man's fight to free himself from family expectations and to be himself, free to dance to his own tune.
Bali Rai was born in Leicester where he grew up in a multicultural community dreaming of playing football for Liverpool FC, being Bob Marley or becoming a writer. He writes the books he would have enjoyed as a teenager and Rani and Sukh is a set-text for GCSE English. His novel Killing Honour won the North East Teenage Book Award and was described as “utterly compelling” by The Bookseller; Now or Never was shortlisted for the Little Rebels Prize in 2020.
