The Exotic Rissole

‘I put some rissoles in sandwiches for you two. Dig in.’ Lynchy grabbed two and handed me one. We bit into them while sipping our SodaStream-manufactured soft drink. A rush came over me as I tasted the spice-free rissole bursting across my taste buds. It was worth the wait.

Can life be too spicy? Suffering from an overload of turmeric and the complexities of growing up in an immigrant Bangladeshi family in Sydney’s west, eleven-year-old Tanveer Ahmed thinks it probably can. And so begins an unpredictable, and very entertaining, double life – sampling the delights of Aussie cuisine, joining a cricket team that gets mistaken for a terrorist group and a stint as a Bollywood-style game show host. After discovering an aversion to dead bodies as a medical student, Tanveer, quite inevitably, decides he’ll become a psychiatrist. The Exotic Rissole is an irreverent and very honest memoir. It’s about the unexpected stories that emerge when cultures clash and the mix of identities that make up a life, held together loosely with breadcrumbs and egg.