Brown Baby

A Memoir of Race, Family and Home

Brown Baby is a powerful exploration of fatherhood, grief, racism and hope. It is also a love letter to the author’s daughters that is as heartbreakingly tender as it is funny and relatable.

How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is racist, sexist and facing climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer?

In Brown Baby Nikesh Shukla explores themes of racism, feminism, parenting and our shifting ideas of home. With writing that will both fill and open your heart, this by turns, heartbreaking, hilariously funny and intensely relatable memoir is dedicated to the author’s two young daughters, and is in remembrance of the grandmother they never got to meet.

Through love, grief, food, fatherhood and the often cluttered experiences that make us each who we are, Shukla shows how it’s possible to believe in hope.

‘A wise and wonderful book from the hugely talented Nikesh Shukla. Written for his daughters, inspired by his mother whom they never got to meet, this love letter to his brown babies encompasses fatherhood, feminism, racial politics, growing up and being a grown up, with tenderness, depth and humour.’ — Meera Syal