The Life and Times of a Very British Man

A revealing, honest and often comic coming-of-age story about growing up in 1970s Britain on the boundaries of race

'Full of charm' GUARDIAN

'An account of what being British means' i

'Captures a country in transition ... You can't fail to be moved' THE TIMES

Kamal Ahmed's childhood was very ‘British’ in every way – except for the fact that he was brown. Half English, half Sudanese, he was raised at a time when being mixed-race meant being told to go home, even when you were born just down the road.

This is his account of an upbringing of cricket and bucket-and-spade holidays, Angel Delight and the BBC - British to the core, yet always feeling foreign in the only home he had ever known.

'Ahmed grew up as a mixed-race kid in west London in the seventies, and his book charts the progress (sometimes slow and now without a few setbacks along the way) that our country has made on race issues since then. Brilliant' Rohan Silva, Evening Standard