
Hello!
Onjali here.
Welcome to my
Worlds...

The Girl at the Front
of the Class
Celebrating the sixth anniversary of
The Boy at the Front of the Class, comes
The Girl at the Front of the Class!
My first every picture book delving into the ongoing crisis of inhumanity facing so many refugees, and written especially for children aged 3-5 years old.
Come and meet Layla and Adam: two little children with a big tale to tell...
Illustrated by Pippa Curnick.
Now available in all good bookstores.
Contributions ...
My Stage Worlds ...

Footsteps on the Wind:
An Animation ...
What do you get when award-winning writer Sita Brahmachari, and a director with a vision called Maya Sanbar, approach you to co-storyboard an animation for a song by Sting, written to honour child refugees?
A globally acclaimed, UNHCR backed animation, hitting schools and film festivals worldwide...
My Pause for Thoughts ...
My Current Reads...
CHILDREN'S

This one is must for any future (or current) Agatha Christie addicts like I was (and remain)! And as a Muslim girl who never thought she'd see the day when TWO Muslim girls would be at the heart of a super fun murder mystery, this is a dream I didn't know I had come true.
Mixing the humour and nostalgia of 'The Parent Trap' franchise (separated twins, forced together) with a good dose of a proper whodunit, I already can't help hoping Ani and Riri will be back very soon for another easy on the brain adventure.

OK. So I won't lie. I bought this as an impulse Christmas gift for a friend's son (who is reaching 'that age' when boys apparently stop reading as fervently (bah!)) not thinking of reading it myself at all.
​​
But on hearing my friend's son had read it in just a few days and couldn't put it down over the Christmas break, I couldn't help buying myself a copy too.
​​
Within a few pages, it was clear what was so brilliant about it. Two authors penning a brother and sister duo with a penchant for solving riddles, living at Bletchley Park - AND with a missing mother to boot? Quite rightly unputdownable.

Lizzie and Belle are back - just as their dad takes to the stage as the first Black man to play Othello, and the trans-atlantic slave trade becomes an ever ominous presence too.
​
With near-deaths, a smattering of real-life historical characters and a mystery to solve, this series by J.T. Williams does what all fantastic children's books do: it leaves the reader running through its pages, wanting to ask questions about the real-life stories and events encountered.
​
And as questions that NEED to be asked go, racism and London's history with the slave trade is surely up there in the top tiers. Bring on book 3!
​​
ADULTS

Have I read this book (and D.E. Stevenson's two follow-ups) at least twenty times in my lifetime? Yup.
​
Do I care? Nope. Because it's just too delicious. If I were ever to choose a book series to make into a film, Miss Buncle's brilliant Cranford-ish sagas would be the first! One can but dream.
​​

Heart-stopping and revolutionary: two words that are the tip of this volcanic memoir, written by a shero, fighting for her people - and us all.
Trust me when I say, every page read and every battle and racist under-estimator encountered, leaves you as the reader, changed forevermore.​

This one is going to be my bedtime read for at least a year (not least because every paragraph demands a deep thought or three).
Like so many of Dalrymple's masterpieces, it's a humdinger of an eye-opener, bringing right to the fore eradicated and whitewashed histories.
No bad thing to go to sleep musing on the extraordinary, globe-shifting facts and figures which shaped my ancestral land (pre-enforced-partition!)...