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Huma Qureshi’s memoir goes to Elliott & Thompson

Huma

Lauren Gardner has sold world rights of journalist and writer Huma Qureshi’s memoir, to Olivia Bays at Elliott & Thompson, as announced on BookBrunch. How We Met: A Memoir of Family and Falling in Love is a love story that also takes in grief, loss and growing up and will be out in spring 2021 in hardback and ebook.

During her upbringing in Walsall in the 1990s, Qureshi ‘straddled two worlds - school and teenage crushes in one, and the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other’. Her memoir takes us through her years of ‘halal dating’ before she met and fell in love with someone who was ‘not suitable at all’.

Bays said: “I am a huge fan of Huma’s beautiful writing and we are delighted to be publishing How We Met, which feels like a breath of much-needed fresh air right now. By turns heart-wrenching and hopeful, this is the book Huma looked for but never found when she was searching for her own happy ending. We hope it brings many, many readers the same joy it brought us.”

Qureshi is a writer and journalist, and the author previously of In Spite of Oceans (History Press, 2014). She has written for publications including the Guardian, the Times, the Independent and the Observer. She said: “Elliott & Thompson make such beautiful books and I’m so thrilled to be joining their book family. How We Met is, at its heart, very much a love story, but it’s also about grief and loss and growing up. It’s a little bit sad, a little bit funny, but most of all it is full of hope.”