Brown Boy

       
(Hardcover, April 2023)                           (Paperback, April 2024)

Omer Aziz
Brown Boy
(Scribner, April 2023)

Read Omer Aziz’s Latest Op-Ed for The Globe and Mail
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed for The Boston Globe
Read the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Interview With Omer Aziz
A Toronto Star Bestseller
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed in The Globe and Mail
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed in Los Angeles Times
One of Apple Books’ “Spring’s Most Anticipated 2023” 
Read Omer Aziz’s Interview With Publishers Weekly
Featured in Toronto Star‘s “31 Books To Put On Your List For This Winter and Spring”
Read Omer Aziz’s piece about memoirs of enslavement in The Boston Globe

Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s incisive and luminous prose.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage.

In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love with books, and makes his way to Queen’s University in Ontario, Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England, and finally Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself in difficult situations—whether in the suburbs of Paris or at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet the more books Omer reads and the more he moves through elite worlds, his feelings of shame and powerlessness only grow stronger, and clear answers recede further away.

Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world that never quite accepts him. He poses the questions he couldn’t have asked in his youth: Was assimilation ever really an option? Could one transcend the perils of race and class? And could we—the collective West—ever honestly confront the darker secrets that, as Aziz discovers, still linger from the past?

In Brown Boy, Omer Aziz has written a book that eloquently describes the complex process of creating an identity that fuses where he’s from, what people see in him, and who he knows himself to be.

Praise for Brown Boy

“’I was torn within myself, trying to be two people at once,’ writes Aziz…in this striking debut… A sterling portrait of personal revelation, cuts to the bone.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Brown Boy is a poignant, unflinching exploration of cultural identity: the roles we perform, the ways we are misperceived, and the conflicted feelings we can have about our pasts. Omer Aziz illuminates what it is like to be the child of immigrants and the unique invisibility that comes with being South Asian. I saw myself reflected in these pages. How rare, to encounter one’s story with such candor and vulnerability. How rare, and how necessary.”
—Maya Shanbhag Lang, author of What We Carry, a New York Times Editors’ Choice

“Eye-opening, achingly honest, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking— an unforgettable book.”
—Amy Chua, author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Political Tribes

Read an Excerpt of Brown Boy in LitHub
Read the Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Brown Boy
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed in Los Angeles Times
Read Omer Aziz’s Interview With Publishers Weekly
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed in The Globe and Mail
Read Omer Aziz’s Op-Ed in Air Mail

Omer Aziz is a lawyer, writer, and former foreign policy advisor in the administration of the Canadian Prime Minister. He was born to working-class parents of Pakistani origin in Toronto, Canada, and with the help of scholarships, became the first in his family to go to college in the West, later studying in Paris, at Cambridge University, and Yale Law School. Aziz has clerked for the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria and served as a foreign policy advisor in the government of Justin Trudeau. He has held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and many other publications. He is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Brown Boy is his first book.