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Almost Brown
- A Mixed-Race Family Memoir
- Narrated by: Seema Doad
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
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Almost Brown
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Publisher's Summary
"A Canadian masterpiece."—Toronto Star
An award-winning writer retraces her unconventional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.
Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey to Canada and the United States in an elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two deeply eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke, feminist uprisings, racial alliances and divides, a divorce, multiple grudges, and plenty of bad fashion. The family implodes, but after twenty years of silence, father and daughter reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.
Almost Brown is a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming book about the brilliant messiness of a mixed-race family and a search for answers to the question, What are you? Tender and incisive, it is both a deeply personal memoir and an excavation into ethnicity, ancestry, and race—a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about identity today.
What the critics say
“Almost Brown is that rarest of things: a memoir that is both deeply intimate and intellectually ambitious. It examines race and the issue of belonging fearlessly, and at the same time is a tender, touching, often very funny tale of growing up and finding your way. Gill is a narrator you come to love.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book
“Charlotte Gill fearlessly examines the complexities and subtleties of growing up mixed race, offering an exploration of identity and belonging that is beyond skin tone and nationality, and a sharply observed commentary on one's own privilege and bias. This wonderfully written memoir is also a loving tribute to Gill’s father, a character she evokes with tenderness and nuance. Intimate, moving, and whip-smart, Almost Brown dazzles with humour and heart.”—Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving
“Beautifully written . . . this book hit me in all sorts of funny-tender spots. . . . Through immersive investigation and sharp social commentary, Gill overturns humanist platitudes and dicey purisms while recognizing the ongoing power of colonial hierarchies and racial arrangements. A truly moving and insightful book.”—Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life