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Consumed: In Search of my Sister - SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2021
Arifa Akbar
Textile artworks, Memoirs, Illness & addiction: social aspects
A moving memoir about TB, grief, sisterhood, poverty and the reservoir of blame, guilt and unreliable memories from a troubled childhood in Lahore and London.
*** SHORTLISTED for the 2021 COSTA BOOK AWARDS: BIOGRAPHY, PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE and the JHALAK PRIZE ***
'Moving, engrossing, elegantly written' Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
When Arifa Akbar discovered that her sister had fallen seriously ill, she assumed there would be a brief spell in hospital and then she'd be home. It was not until the day before she died that the family discovered she was suffering from tuberculosis.
On a mission to unearth family secrets and finally understand her sister, Arifa takes us to Rome to haunt the places Keats and her sister had explored, to her grandparent's house in Pakistan, to her sister's hospital bedside in Hampstead and back to the London of the seventies when her family arrived, poor, homeless and hungry.
Consumed is an eloquent and moving exploration of sisterhood, grief and the redemptive power of art.
Arifa Akbar
Arifa Akbar is the Guardian's chief theatre critic. A journalist for over twenty years, she is the former literary editor of the Independent, where she also worked as arts correspondent and news reporter. She has previously contributed to the Observer and the Financial Times. She is on the board of trustees for the Orwell Foundation and English PEN. Short pieces of her non-fiction have appeared in several anthologies. Consumed is her first book.
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