The Colour of Love by Preethi Nair

The Colour of Love

Preethi Nair

Nina's attempts to realise her dream of becoming an artist lead her to all sorts of deviousness and deceptions to hide the fact from her family and her arranged marriage fiance. (Difficult when she wins the Turner Prize and appears on TV!) Her solutions to some of her problems are rather extreme and only entangle her further in a web of deception. Good descriptions of a traditional Ugandan/Asian family living in modern suburban London add up to a cheerful and undemanding read.

Extract
2nd December 1999
I know that hurtling a saffron-stained coconut over London Bridge at six- thirty in the morning should have set some alarm bells off. The tramp peered up at me from his cardboard box as if to say that I would be joining him very soon. But the Guru had said it would remove the stagnation in my life, me being represented by a hairy coconut and the water representing flow. The Thames did not glisten at me. Well, it couldn't really as it was pitch black and probably frozen, but I believed it was glistening, shimmering even, and leading me to better things.
Parallels
  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Brick Lane by Monica Ali