Good Intentions is a stunning debut willing to contend with the uglier realities of our culture without solely placing blame on a parental monolith, without refusing to question the cyclical nature of perpetuated abuse, and without brushing past the need for millennial accountability. They start a conversation--first awkward, then absorbing--that grabs Nur's attention like never before. Nur was not always very easy to root for even though it is clear that he and Mina truly care for each other.

everything that's a no in Islam, is made out to like oh people are this judgmental and it's made out to be that its people's beliefs and that they are rigid to the point of ridiculing it out. Nur loves how she gets so excited about something that could so easily become mundane to other people, the same year in, year out. A well written novel that gave an inside of a young British Pakistani man who went away for University and met a woman of his dreams, a woman of colour.It was a relief to reach the concluding chapters of the novel and watch the consequences of all of Nur's actions come to a head, Yasmina exposing at length how the problem was never really Nur's family - it was Nur. Deftly transporting readers between that first night and the years beyond, Kasim Ali's Good Intentions exposes with unblinking authenticity the complexities of immigrant families and racial prejudice. That tends to confuse me and I did not enjoy in this and I don't enjoy it in any other book with time jumps.

We learn about Kate’s possibly stalling career and Leo’s plan to apply to acting schools against his mother’s wishes. We also have Imran, the friend from University, from a Muslim Pakistani background who has come out to his family, he faces discrimination from his parents because of his sexual orientation. In the end, we find out that his family never really had a problem with Nur dating Yasmina, as long as she's Muslim.Opening on New Years Eve, with Nur gathering up the courage to tell his parents about Yasmina, the novel takes a non-linear route through the four years of their relationship before this point and the ways in which Nur’s family react to his secret. Nur has offered to take his entire family to London before, to pay for the train tickets and the hotel, let them see in real life what they have so often watched through a screen, but each time they have refused, saying it is too much money. While Nur frets over his family’s reaction to what he perceives to be his failure to live up to their ideal of “a good son”, Yasmina must contend with the fact that her boyfriend hides her from the world, blinded by his own privilege to the intersection of oppression she faces as a Black, Muslim woman.

There is something of a Sally Rooney vibe to this story about twentysomethings navigating adult waters (the snappy dialogue, the conflicted emotions, the relationship dramas) . Ever since he can remember, his family has sat in front of their TV together on New Year’s Eve, counted down to midnight, and watched the fireworks in London. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Nur, is always shitting on the customs so far so that at the end of the book, a bestfriend of his doesn't even tell him something important about himself.

What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling.