Punglish Author Page

Punglish

One Boy · Two Worlds · One Identity

A warm, funny novel of growing up between England and Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s.

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Paperback & Kindle: coming soon · Hardback Dust Jacket Edition: Ramadan 2027

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About the book

Osman is growing up in 1970s England, the son of Pakistani parents who crossed continents to build a life here. He lives in two worlds at once: fish and chips and biryani, the mosque and the school nativity, his grandmother’s prayers and a playground where he is cast, always, as the sidekick.

Then, aged seven, he is taken to Pakistan for the first time, to a family he has only ever known through blue airmail letters, and a country that turns out to be the richest education of his life.

Tender, funny and unsparingly observed, Punglish is a child’s-eye account of belonging, faith and quiet racism, told not by a witness to the immigrant experience but from deep inside it.

Belonging · Migration · Faith · Family · Comedy · The 1970s–80s

An extract

There were five of them down that end. Osman and four other boys, all of them English, none of them thinking anything at all.

“Let’s just go home.”

He never knew who said it. He would have told you, at any point in the decades since, that he genuinely did not know, and nobody ever believed him, because it sounds like the thing you say when you are covering for somebody. But the words came out of the middle of five boys and after that it was not a sentence any more.

Then one of them was at the door with his shoes in his hand.

And that was that. Because once one of them had gone there was no possible way to be the one who did not, and Osman was through the door before he had entirely finished thinking about it, which was, he would come to notice, how most of the interesting decisions of his life got made.

They ran.

He could not breathe for the joy of it.

from Chapter Eight, ‘The Escape’

About the author

Adam Ayoub is the pen name of an author of Punjabi Pakistani Muslim heritage, born in London. The themes of this book are drawn from his own experience of growing up between two worlds in 1970s Britain.

Away from the page, he strives to be a loyal and loving husband and father, and to bring the best version of himself to his wider family, friends, neighbours, community and society at large.

Published under Ayoub Press.

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