Although she has her own little flat, she is in her 30s and with no marriage prospects she is considered past it because the older she gets the less likely it is that she will find someone. Rani met her own husband, tech company exec Bhupinder Rehal, at the age of 30, but felt pressure to settle down her whole life.

Following the discovery of some love letters to her grandfather from an unknown woman, she decides to go to India and find out about her grandfather's first wife. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Readers are taken on a journey of love and loss while uncovering how the partition changed lives in Pakistan and India. The one thing that I thought was brilliant and which I keep coming back to, is the fact that with the exception of Sid (and even he's just a foil for Baby), men play only a cursory part in this story. And you see Baby go through with her mother and aunts trying to set her up with an arranged marriage.I am in awe of first of all her writing and beauty of her writing, and the pain she manages to express and the fact that her main character doesn’t speak. Never mind how unrealistic it felt that a total stranger should devote his time to her journey, I was disappointed by the knight in shining armour trope. Baby also realises how lacking the British school history curriculum is given the diversity of our country and the fact that for 300 years, Britain’s main focus was India and the Empire, with Britain’s historical wealth, development and achievements made on the back of India, yet all that is taught in British schools are ‘two world wars and how great the Victorians were’.

It's clear Naseeb was once married to Baby's dad's dad (both men are now dead), and she definitely isn't Baby's grandmother (her dadima), who's downstairs making delicious food for Baby's party. I want them to see me for me, but I also want them to see that Asian women can be something more than just smart and trustworthy and clever and square. Instead of being written as a worthy, historical tome it is a genrle stroll through modern culture by a local Bradford lass about another Bradford lass. back in 2018, in which she discovered what had happened to her grandfather’s first family during the Partition.Baby Does A Runner is an enjoyable and entertaining read and I look forward to reading more from Rani in the future. For that reason I really liked this book as the froth will draw in the casual reader but the meat on the bones makes it memorable.