Margins
Corner Shop book cover
Corner Shop
2008
First Published
3.27
Average Rating
360
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
3.27
Number of Ratings
391
5 STARS
10%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
41%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
3%
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Author

Roopa Farooki
Roopa Farooki
Author · 10 books

Roopa was brought up in London and graduated from New College in Oxford in 1995. She worked in advertising and it 2004 quit to write full time. She now lives in south east London and south west France with her husband and two sons. Bitter Sweets is her first novel and in 2007 it was nominated for the Orange Award for New Writer. Her second novel, Corner Shop was released in October 2008 and her third novel is due in 2009.

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