First-generation South Asian immigrants are not accorded the same linguistic breath, back-story or vision as British Asians or whites: "Don't give me stupid question. Gaffes are rare, but astounding: "How often you hear bout female Islamic fundamentalists?" Quite a lot, actually.Reading Londonstani is like watching 500 episodes of Goodness Gracious Me There is a serious lack of depth. Worthy societal discussions and interminable economics tutorials represent a tedious and insufficiently fictionalised attempt to provide broader historical context. Like too much British Asian drama and fiction, far from challenging the reader, the book is full of restaurants and (arranged) marriages - the easy drippings of South Asian culture, the types of paradigm through which white elites perceive the "other". The author's fear of being off message dilutes the novel's power, reaffirms liberal bourgeois boundaries and marks the book down as teen blaxploitation.If it is to be real, redemption has to be hard-fought, not delivered through platitudes. Non-Standard English words are neither italicised nor glossed. The powerful, sometimes homoerotic, depiction of violence and sexual frustration parallels a harnessing of living thought-speech which allows Malkani to break away from the stultifying rigidity of "Home Counties" narrative style, and this frees his protagonist to express high-order thought in a fluid demotic.However, Londonstani is best described as a competent early effort.

"Here lies Jas, My surname too fuckin long an too fuckin shameful to fit on my own fuckin gravestone". London is defined by a highly flammable mixture of pre-modern tribalism, post- modern subculture and late capitalist individualism. In a linguistic politics redolent of Sam Selvon, Victor Headley and Irvine Welsh, Malkani conveys with ?n and expertise, through a suburban "desi-dialect", the absurdity of adolescence and the complex self-deceptions of contemporary cultural dynamics in the UK. The novel centres on a critique of the patriarchal oppressiveness, hypocrisy, power-freakery, super-materialism and general neurotic misery of South Asian extended-family psychodrama and it works best as a satire aimed at the teenage market. The aspirational gangsta swirls us into a bhuna of gang-fights, inter-faith romance and organised crime, and the dizzy humour that underpins his voice is sharp, clever and convincing. On the contrary.Carole Angier's biography of Primo Levi is published by Penguin. This book narrates in the first person the adventures of Jas, who recently has joined a gang of Sikh and Hindu youths, led by "Hard-jit" (real name Harjit), in the "little India" of west London. I know it's because he failed to protect Alice, but what does it mean? Is young Alistair's constant fear meant to be a collective unconscious memory? Is that why he "instinctively" holds his hands up, like the little boy with the yellow star in the famous photograph? This is a gratuitously violent book, not dignified by its Holocaust borrowing.

He is cast as a young Jewish boy who dies in the Holocaust, and he falls in love with Alice, who plays his sister. Something nasty happens to Alice; years later Alistair does something nasty too, and then dies. Alistair Black, the hero of What Happens Now, is said to be Jewish, but for all we see of his character and background he might as well be Scottish, as his name suggests.He is a natural actor, and when the BBC comes looking for child actors, Alistair is chosen. Seeds of Greatness is wonderful on Jews - not just funny (a camera so simple it says: "can be used by Jews"), but serious too (on Jewish families wanting either only good news, or only bad).