This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed

My husband and I moved to a new apartment just over two weeks ago and I feel like there is still so much to do, from updating my address in all the places it needs to be updated to unpacking clothes and books (which we can’t actually do until our new bookcases arrive and storage unit arrive, which will be … who knows when, based on my phone call today with IKEA). All of which is to say, I was in the mood for an “easier” read, by which I mean something plot-driven and engaging. I think in other moods I might have been not so into this novel’s prose style (present-tense first-person narration, very straightforward/not a whole lot of descriptive paragraphs) but in my current mood I was happy to just immerse myself in the story, which is a coming-out/figuring-stuff-out story whose protagonist is Amar, who’s 28 and newly-engaged at the start of the book. We learn a little about Amar’s background—how he used to work in advertising but was fired after he couldn’t cope with his grief after his mom’s death, how he met his fiancé, Joshua, at the bookshop where he started working after that—and then we see him coming out to his family (his older sister, his two older brothers, all of their spouses, and his younger sister) via WhatsApp message. Well—the wife of one of his brothers already knows that Amar is gay, but he’s never talked about it with the rest of his siblings and in-laws, who are all “second-generation Bangladeshi Muslims in East London.” They don’t respond particularly well, and Amar wonders if his relationship with Joshua means he’ll be permanently estranged from his family. Meanwhile, Joshua’s mom is getting perhaps too excited about their wedding, and the bookshop where Amar works might have to close, and Amar finds himself having doubts about whether he and Joshua can even make their relationship work, given their cultural differences. Amar has a lot to deal with, and his history of being partly closeted and scared and therefore not super-communicative doesn’t help. Though I tend to like more lyrical narrative voices, I was rooting for Amar as a character and engrossed in the various subplots. And there were moments I was charmed by his narrative voice, like this moment, after Joshua tells him not to worry about people staring when they’re visiting Joshua’s family in Dorset and Amar is the only non-white person in sight: “I am not worried – but, I mean, I’d be a lot more not-worried if I saw more melanin.” Or this, when Amar is explaining what he likes about working at the bookshop: “I love the quiet in the mornings and just listening to the hum of the lights. I love burly men surprising me by buying Margaret Atwood novels. I love that people like Joshua can walk in here and discover a new favourite book.”