Written in 1990, Hanif Kureshi's Whitbread Award winning debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, is the story of Karim Amir or 'Creamy Jeans' to his friends, a bisexual actor of Pakistani and English descent, trying to escape from the boredom and smallmindedness of suburbia, into the big, wide world of London. Set in the Bromley and Anerley boroughs of The Big Smoke in the 70's, The Buddha of Suburbia is essentially a late 20th century coming-of-age story, a period of life made harder for the protagonist by the pervasive racism of a society that blames immigrants for the ills of the nation.
It was turned into a
TV series by the
BBC in 1993, to great effect and some outcry after it featured a protracted scene of
group sex, which wasn't particularly
explicit but which was nevertheless ground breaking by television standards.
It's been a while since I read the book, so I'll attempt to re-work this writeup after a quick re-read