Emigrating Home

A TANGLE OF IDENTITIES

This  review appeared on amazon.co.uk

"Emigrating Home is a powerful book, deeply serious under a finely constructed and often very funny veneer of anecdote and memory. It deals with the tangle of identities that a young man finds himself in in the early 1950s as he wrestles with the implications of a family which brings together Egypt and Jamaica, and a culture that mixes the serious and devoted Englishness of the Caribbean with the distant magnetism of the Near East.
 
"Educated first in Jamaica and then at English public school and university, the author is always shrewd and always affectionate in his view of both his countries. The unstable equilibrium is upset by the Suez War and the possibility of the author's being drafted into the British army to invade his father's -his third - country.

 "The consequences are earth-shaking. With his sense of self and of belonging changing in his hands, the author travels for the first time to Egypt, to his father's family and a culture and a language of which he knows little or nothing.

"This is the "emigrating home" of the title, and once again he provides us with a remarkable take on Egypt in the 1950s, sensitive and puzzled. He manages to retain the freshness of perception that - half a century later - still offers striking cameos on cultural contrasts large and small - like the complete inability of an Englishman to walk like an Egyptian.
There is much more, and every page a pleasure to savour more than once.
 
"Read this book: at a time when identities are in flux everywhere in the world, Yasseen's journey has a great deal to tell us about crossing cultural boundaries with grace, humour, tolerance and humanity. We must hope that there is more to come from this splendid writer.” -- Martin Rose