Published in 2023
278 pages
8 hours and 36 minutes
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi has previously published short stories, reviews, translations, essays, monologues, and poetry. She has also worked as an editor and a playwright. Ayesha was contributing editor for the Serial Productions podcast The Trojan Horse Affair, and has been anthologized by Tilted Axis Press, Peepal Tree Press, Influx Press, EMC, and Oberon Books, and published in The Independent, Ceasefire, The Theatre Times, Wasafiri, and Media Diversified. Her plays and monologues have had rehearsed readings and stagings at venues including the Rich Mix, Theatre503, and the Tristan Bates Theatre in London, and the Impact Hub in Birmingham, and she’s also written for BBC Radio 4. Ayesha is from Karachi and lives in London.
What is this book about?
A darkly comic, speculative debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost.
Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents’ generous allowance, and discussing the “underside of life” with her best friend, Naima. Anisa’s mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career.
But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret. Adam begrudgingly tells Anisa about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees near-instant fluency in any language. Skeptical but intrigued, Anisa enrolls—stripped of her belongings, contact with the outside world, and bodily autonomy—and emerges ten days later fluent in German. As Anisa enmeshes herself further within The Centre, seduced by all that it’s made possible, she soon realizes the true cost of its services.
By turns dark, funny, and surreal, and with twists thrilling and shocking, The Centre takes the listener on a journey through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation with biting specificity, and ultimately asking: what is success really worth?
