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Almost Brown

A Memoir

Audiobook
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
"A Canadian masterpiece."—Toronto Star
An award-winning writer retraces her unconventional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey to Canada and the United States in an elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two deeply eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke, feminist uprisings, racial alliances and divides, a divorce, multiple grudges, and plenty of bad fashion. The family implodes, but after twenty years of silence, father and daughter reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.
Almost Brown is a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming book about the brilliant messiness of a mixed-race family and a search for answers to the question, What are you? Tender and incisive, it is both a deeply personal memoir and an excavation into ethnicity, ancestry, and race—a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about identity today.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 1, 2023
      This moving memoir from Gill (Eating Dirt) explores her experiences as a self-described “Indo-Saxon”—the daughter of a Punjabi Sikh man and a British woman—navigating tumultuous family relationships and feelings of cultural rootlessness. Raised in Canada and the U.S. by immigrant parents who struggled to understand both cultures, Gill ably addresses the cultural and racial tensions she faced inside and outside her home, especially those driven by her father, whose own upbringing in India and Kenya instilled beliefs that felt antithetical to the family’s American lifestyle (he “hit the ceiling” when Gill got her ears pierced). As a teen, Gill’s father abandoned the family and they fell out of touch for several years before reconnecting when she was an adult. In lyrical, near-poetic prose, Gill uses their relationship as a springboard to touch on themes of belonging and identity-making relevant to anyone who has ever struggled to place themselves within their own lineage. “I didn’t understand that we were a cup poured into a tide of generational wavelets, people leaving and starting over, each paying the toll in a new world by giving up a little bit of the old one,” Gill writes. Readers should expect to have their heartstrings tugged. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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