The Really Popular Book Club: Sofia Khan is Not Obliged by Ayisha Malik

Tue 24 January 2023

The Really Popular Book Club is the online reading group hosted by Cambridge University Libraries. Everyone is invited to join us and our special guests to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.

Labelled ‘the Muslim Bridget Jones’, Malik’s debut novel Sofia Khan is Not Obliged borrows heavily from Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel to tell the story of Sofia Khan, a British Muslim woman living and working in publishing in London. The novel takes the form of a diary following Sofia’s adventures in love as she tries to write a book on Muslim dating commissioned by her culturally-clumsy editor.

Our special guest for the evening will be Amy Burge, Senior Lecturer in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham. She is an expert in popular genre fiction, in particular romance. She has published work on historical romance novels, Middle Eastern chick lit, and Mills & Boon sheikh romance. She is leading the AHRC-funded Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction Research Network, which is taking a closer look at popular fiction works authored by Muslim women. Find out more: https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/.

This event is hosted online using Zoom. Further information about The Really Popular Book Club, including our FAQs, can be found here: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/bookclub.

Cost: Free