Corner Shop: A Novel

Roopa Farooki

Feb 2009 · Kuthengiswe ngu-St. Martin's Press

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There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting your heart's desire - and the other? Getting it. Fourteen-year-old Lucky Khalil loves three things: football, Star Wars and Portia, the girl who works in his grandfather's corner shop. In that order. But Lucky has a destiny – worse than a destiny, he has a dream. He dreams that one day, his lucky left foot will win the World Cup for England . It torments him, because it tastes real, because when he wakes he weeps with disappointment that it is just a dream.

Meanwhile, Lucky's mother Delphine seems to have had all her dreams come true. But Delphine feels increasingly trapped in her apparently perfect marriage and gilded lifestyle. She fantasizes about rediscovering the freedom of her youth, but rekindling a relationship with her maverick father-in-law, Zaki, is only going to end in disaster.

Zaki, a charming gambler who loved and lost Delphine long before she married his sensible and successful son, feels equally trapped in the corner shop that he has unwillingly run for years for his family's sake. He wonders whether the time has come to abandon his middle class responsibilities, to try once more to achieve his own long-forgotten dreams.

As each of the Khalils discovers in Roopa Farooki's beautifully written and richly layered tale, the closer one's dreams become, the more risk there is of losing sight of what really matters.

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Roopa Farooki was born in Lahore, Pakistan , and brought up in London. She graduated from New College, Oxford in 1995 and worked in advertising before writing fiction full time. Roopa now lives in Southeast England and Southwest France with her husband and two sons. Her first novel, Bitter Sweets, was nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers.