Sana Goyal in The Guardian:

“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.

Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.

Tahliil is an asylum seeker from Somalia, who, together with his sister, Sumayya, joins their mother in Leicester. He works as an at-home carer and at a cash-and-carry for cash-in-hand while he waits for the Home Office to grant his request for asylum. With a chequered past and an uncertain future, he feels untethered to and untrusting of the world around him. That is, until he sees Mira, who has started working as a cook at the neighbouring sweet shop.

More here.

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