Virtual - Soniah Kamal - UNMARRIAGEABLE

This event will be presented on ZOOM. Click here to register!

Soniah Kamal will be in conversation with Devoney Looser.

A beloved Austen classic gets a vibrant contemporary update in UNMARRIAGEABLE: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan by Soniah Kamal. Full of color, romance, and delicious food, the audience will find themselves transported to modern-day Pakistan in a story that feels both familiar and fresh. Kamal’s re-telling will be sure to charm readers – whether they have read Pride & Prejudice or not.

The Binat family has been down on their luck recently as scandal and a vicious rumor has destroyed their fortune and prospects, much to Mrs. Binat’s chagrin. But Alys Binat – the second eldest and most practical of five sisters – has happily settled into her life as a school teacher to young girls. Using Jane Austen and her other literary heroes as examples, Alys hopes to inspire her students to dream of more. But when an invitation arrives to the biggest and most exclusive wedding their small town has seen in years, everything for the Binats begins to change. 

On the first night of the festivities, Alys’s lovely older sister, Jena, catches the eye of Fahad “Bungles” Bingla, the wildly successful—and single—entrepreneur. But Bungles’s friend Valentine Darsee is clearly unimpressed by the Binat family. Alys accidentally overhears his unflattering assessment of her and quickly dismisses him and his snobbish ways. As the days of lavish wedding parties unfold, the Binats wait breathlessly to see if Jena will land a proposal—and Alys begins to realize that Darsee’s brusque manner may be hiding a very different man from the one she saw at first glance.

Told with wry wit and colorful prose, UNMARRIAGEABLE is a charming update on Jane Austen’s beloved novel and an exhilarating exploration of love, marriage, class, and sisterhood.

Soniah Kamal is an award winning novelist, essayist and public speaker. Her recent novel, Unmarriageable, is a Financial Times Readers’ Best Book of 2019, a 2019 Book All Georgians Should Read, and shortlisted for the 2020 Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, An Isolated Incident, was a finalist for the KLF French Fiction Prize and the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Soniah’s TEDx talk is about second chances and ‘We are the Ink’, her  U.S. Citizenship Oath Ceremony address, is about  immigrants and the American Dream. Her work is in the New York Times, Guardian, Buzzfeed, Catapult, Normal School, Georgia Review and more.

Devoney Looser is Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of nine books, including The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), selected as a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book / Nonfiction. Her most recent title is an edition of genuine Austen quotations, The Daily Jane Austen: A Year in Quotes (2019), from the University of Chicago Press. Looser’s essays have appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, The TLS, and Entertainment Weekly, and she’s had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, in support of her biography of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, to be published by Bloomsbury in fall 2021. Fun fact: Looser has also played roller derby under the name “Stone Cold Jane Austen.”