‘Corner Shop' is Roopa Farooki’s second novel, and it is a family drama about the fulfilment of dreams and the bittersweet nature of success, exploring the unexpected tragedy of achieving one's goals too early in life.
Fourteen year old Lucky Khalil is a schoolboy with a dream so outlandish that he may as well dream about being God, he dreams that he will score for England in the World Cup. He is passionate about three things: football, Star Wars, and Portia, the girl who works in his grandfather's corner shop, in that order.
While Lucky pursues his girl and his footballing aspirations, his mother Delphine, the woman who seems to have got everything she has always wanted, feels increasingly trapped in her apparently perfect marriage and gilded lifestyle. She fantasizes about rediscovering the freedom of her youth, but rekindling a relationship with her maverick father-in-law, Zaki, is only going to end in disaster, three generations of her family together…and which are really keeping them apart.
And Zaki, a charming gambler who loved and lost Delphine long before she married his sensible and successful son, equally trapped in the corner shop that he has unwillingly run for years for his family's sake, wonders whether the time has come to abandon his middle class respectability and responsibilities, and try to achieve his own long-forgotten dreams once more.
But, as they all move closer to their dreams, do they risk losing sight of what's really important?