Brown Boy: A Memoir -- Omer Aziz, Hardcover

Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz's incisive and luminous prose.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage.

In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love with books, and makes his way to Queen's University in Ontario, Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England, and finally Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself in difficult situations--whether in the suburbs of Paris or at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet the more books Omer reads and the more he moves through elite worlds, his feelings of shame and powerlessness only grow stronger, and clear answers recede further away.

Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world that never quite accepts him. He poses the questions he couldn't have asked in his youth: Was assimilation ever really an option? Could one transcend the perils of race and class? And could we--the collective West--ever honestly confront the darker secrets that, as Aziz discovers, still linger from the past?

In Brown Boy, Omer Aziz has written a book that eloquently describes the complex process of creating an identity that fuses where he's from, what people see in him, and who he knows himself to be.

Author: Omer Aziz
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 04/04/2023
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.80w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9781982136314

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/31/2022
Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/01/2022 pg. 17
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2023

About the Author
Omer Aziz was born to working-class Pakistani-Canadian parents in Toronto and was educated through scholarships at Queen's University, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School. He has written for publications such as the New York Times and the Atlantic, and has worked for politicians such as the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as well as the country's foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland.