What Souls Are Made Of is OUT TODAY
Today is the day: my YA remix of Wuthering Heights, What Souls Are Made Of, is out in the world. If you want a South Asian diaspora Gothic, where the son of a lascar sailor and the daughter of an East India Company officer grapple with trauma, ghosts, and their love for each other - you may enjoy this book!
It’s a privilege to be published as part of Feiwel & Friends YA remixed classics series, alongside great books like So Many Beginnings, A Clash of Steel, Travelers Along the Way, and the upcoming My Dear Henry and Self-Made Boys. I really can’t emphasise enough how - in our current garbage fire of a political climate - books that actively speak with and alchemise the Western literary canon in ways that give people of colour throughout history an imagined life, a space and a voice, are the stuff that keep me going.
I knew South Asians had a history in Britain pre-1940s, no matter what may be popularly believed about the modern roots of ‘multiculturalism’. But reading and researching 18th century Britain was a revelation for me. It taught me about the price of Britain’s wealth. About people who suffered, and atrocities that were swept under the rug. And it also taught me about the people who fought, and advocated and lived and dreamed, fiercely and joyously, even in the darkest hours.
It was a direct encounter with ghosts: the people and stories never recorded, or deliberately erased, and the ones that mainstream history has chosen not to remember. It was a reminder that sometimes fiction is the place where you give ghosts life again.
You can buy What Souls Are Made Of at Bookshop, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and probably a few other places that haven’t occurred to me. I am so glad this book is out of my hands, and out in the world, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.