The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Kureishi's first novel, is generally considered to be the most successful of his prose fictions. The winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, it has been translated into more than twenty languages and was adapted into an acclaimed four-part BBC television series in 1993. Like My Beautiful Laundrette, it is centred on a mixed-race British-Asian protagonist, Karim Amir, though its historical focus is the 1970s rather than the 1980s. Like this film, The Buddha is also at once a “condition of England” piece, an exploration of the changing meanings of “Englishness” and an analysis of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

At the outset of the novel, Karim's tee

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Published 12 January 2001

Citation: Moore-Gilbert, Bart. "The Buddha of Suburbia". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1371, accessed 9 February 2010.]