The Really Popular Book Club is the reading group hosted by Cambridge University Libraries. Everyone is invited to join us and our special guests to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.
Labelled ‘the Muslim Bridget Jones’, Malik’s debut novel Sofia Khan is Not Obliged borrows heavily from Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel to tell the story of Sofia Khan, a British Muslim woman living and working in publishing in London. The novel takes the form of a diary following Sofia’s adventures in love as she tries to write a book on Muslim dating commissioned by her culturally-clumsy editor.
Our special guest for the evening will be Amy Burge, Senior Lecturer in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham. She is an expert in popular genre fiction, in particular romance. She has published work on historical romance novels, Middle Eastern chick lit, and Mills & Boon sheikh romance. She is leading the AHRC-funded Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction Research Network, which is taking a closer look at popular fiction works authored by Muslim women. Find out more: https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/.
About the book, Amy says: ‘it’s probably one of the most well-known recent publications by a British Muslim genre writer. The novel – and its sequel The Other Half of Happiness (2017) – blend genre motifs with themes of Islamophobia and cultural integration: the ending may not be what you expect…’.
As well as hearing from Amy about her thoughts and observations, we will once again be opening the floor up to you, our club members, to share your own observations and remarks. To get you thinking and to help prepare any comments or questions you might want to share, we have prepared three starter questions:
1. How does Sofia approach dating and romance in the text? How do her views differ from those around her (her parents, her friends, her colleagues)? And for those of you who made it to the end – were you surprised who she ended up with?
2. Malik gives us several instances of racisms in the text. What did you make of the different kinds of prejudice Sofia faces (at work, in public)? How does she deal with it?
3. Sofia Khan was marketed as a chick lit rewriting of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Do you notice any connections between them? If you’re a reader of romance or chick lit, which genre markers can you spot as you’re reading?
Further information about The Really Popular Book Club, including our FAQs, can be found here.
Where: Online via Zoom Meetings
Registration: Free, booking essential. REGISTER HERE
Date: Tuesday 24 January 2023