Very Interesting! A little tedious because the entire book follows his entire education in Britain, but also interesting because it does give you an idea of what it is like there, especially as a minority. I had no idea people were to racist! He deals with it valiantly though. Had no idea people have trouble finding a place to rent or what new immigrants had to go through back then. I would have gone straight back to Pakistan if I had to deal with what his parents had to. ( )

A lively book group discussion.

I recently heard Imran Ahmad speak at a literary festival and I have to say he was a riveting speaker. He kept a large audience highly entertained for an hour with the ease of a natural.
As a result of this excellent one-man-show I recommended we try his book at our monthly reading group.
Unfortunately it was not received with the enthusiasm of other Amazon reviewers and my star rating above reflects the average view of the 9 people who discussed the book, two of whom only gave 1 star.

The style was a bit difficult to crack at first, described by one lady as 'wooden'. Personally, this didn't bother me after the first few chapters but I would have liked to have seen a development of the style as the author grew and matured.
We also wondered why there was so little reference to the other members of his family, especially his brothers. I found myself wondering how they were coping with life in a state school, how did their experience compare with that of their older brother?
One of our members was particularly incensed by some of his comments about Islam. She has said she will communicate with him directly and I do not intend to air her views here.

It is basically a coming-of-age diary, with many of the experiences that any normal growing boy would have, compounded by the feeling of being an outsider due to race and religion. There were some interesting themes running through the book, particularly cars and their accompanying status, and the problem of meeting women. Neither of these are unique to immigrant families.
The ongoing conflict in the author's mind between Islam and Christianity are what makes this book unusual. This is tackled openly and in response to the views of others around him at the time, but does not become overpowering.

I have to say, on the positive side, that this book provided us with one of our livlier discussions, with very little recourse to the questions in the back of some of our copies.
And we want to know if the author ever did have any success with the female sex?? ( )

I thouroughly enjoyed this memoir. It's written in a very readable and deciptively simple style. In his own quiet, subtle way Imran Ahmad has addressed some big themes. The writing though is engaging, and honest, remarkably so, and Imran emerges as a decent young man, with all the bad habits, concerns and confusions of the young. Many of his trial and tribulations along the way are hilarious, and touching, and any of us who have had an unrequited love, or tried to bargin with God, will be able to sympathise with him. ( )

Imran Ahmed’s book Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West drew me in very slowly. It started with sweet remembrances of his early days as a Pakistani boy growing up in London and began to move more quickly as he made his way through school and into University and eventually graduate school and a career. His prose is very undecorated and straightforward. He makes you laugh with familiarity over awkward teen situations and seethe with anger over the travesties of racism and discrimination. Even though we are very different people, his story felt familiar and uplifting.

He creates tension over three main issues in his life: following his true calling as opposed to the career he thinks he should follow, understanding his faith in light of a backdrop of Western Evangelical Christianity, and meeting and finding someone to love.

As he got older and began to have a more nuanced understanding of career, faith and love I began to get more drawn into his struggles. I wanted for him to become enlightened and understand his life (The same way someone reading your memoir would wish the same for you.) and so it became a book I could not put down. Yes, a simple story about a Muslim boy growing up in the West became a page turner. Who would Imran Ahmed become?

I don’t want to spoil too much of this fine memoir. The joy of this book is in the evolution of Imran’s thinking and the way he slowly comes to self discovery. He is a nice guy and you want him to figure it out so he can enjoy his life. He comes to some resolution in two of the three areas of his life, and the subject of his next memoir might be what happens to him in the third area. I will look forward to reading his next book. ( )

This the funny and often educational story of Ahmad's childhood & early adulthood in Britain, from the 60s to the 90s. He often comes across as somewhat naive, but that is part of the charm of his writing - and I'm sure there is a knowing retrospective wink included in many of the anecdotes. He grew up at a similar time as I, and I found some particular resonances with his experiences. The epilogue, I felt, could have been left out - the last paragraph of the last real chapter would have been a doozy on which to end.

Although I'm not at all religious, I found his learning about his own faith very interesting. His openness and consideration of other faiths, and on what basis we should choose our religion, were very well argued. The encounters with evangelical Christians rang a bell with me from an encounter with Billy Graham in my teens.

An absolutely stonking read - completed in one sitting. ( )