Northern Boy
Meet Rafi Aziz, an ABBA-loving ten-year-old growing up in early ’80s Lancashire. Flamboyant, sensitive and confused about his feelings for the new boy in school, Rafi is a butterfly among the bricks. It isn't easy being different.
He has to face bullies, challenge the shifting expectations of his eccentric mother and break out from the confines of his smalltown world if he is to be true to himself.
But Rafi isn’t prepared to leave his childhood behind without one final flourish of high kicks, a swish of sequinned cape and his impeccably Brylcreemed head held high.
"I laughed and cried and nodded my head in recognition. If it doesn't get a movie deal there is no justice."
Jennie Godfrey, author of Sunday Times besteller The List of Suspicious Things.
Mother pinned me with a severe expression, her kameez rimmed with white where she had leaned into the chapatti-floured edge of the kitchen counter. “I am telling you for your own good, young man. You know what happened to the Rizwan’s middle boy?”
“Mother, I have precisely zero interest in the life and times of Arshad Rizwan.”
Mother snorted. “He was like you. He used to play with girls. Now they say he cannot leave the house. Because of horns! His poor mother.”
I scoffed, but I sounded more like a Bollywood heroine than a villain. While I had a grown-up vocabulary thanks to my love of reading, my voice was like a girl’s. Any aura of macho-ness was further diminished by my clothes, which consisted of a green T-shirt with Tweety Pie on it, yellow cardigan, red shorts and blue Jesus sandals. I had added a candy bracelet and a chunky, fuchsia-coloured ring borrowed from Shazia.
“It is no joking. Who is going to marry you if you look like an ox?” Mother slapped a freshly rolled chapatti onto the tava, sending up a plume of flour as it hit the hot griddle. “Or a . . .” She let the sentence drop while her eyes lingered on my jewellery. I crunched several of the sweets from the bracelet, daring her to challenge me on it.
In her mango-coloured salwaar kameez and glittery sandals, Mother was a peacock among the Formica. She no longer noticed the lopsided unit, peeling linoleum floor or the overflowing Elephant chapatti flour bag serving as a makeshift bin. A well-trodden path was worn between the work surface on which she rolled her chapattis, and the cooker, its gas burners lined with crinkly tin foil that had long lost its sheen.