Here’s the cover of Tourism, the Southall-centric novel by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal due out May 30 (thanks, Ennis and Pablo):

Bhupinder ‘Puppy’ Singh Johal - handsome, rakish and spiritually disenfranchised - has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. When sloaney rich girl Sophie falls for him, he grabs the chance to escape his past and pursue the woman of his dreams, the voluptuous sophisticate Sarupa, who happens to be engaged to Sophie’s cousin… Set in the long hot summer of 2002, Tourism is a filthy, unflinching and politically incorrect take on modern Britain. [Link]

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal is thirty-one years old. A freelance journalist, he writes for the Times, the Guardian and the Evening Standard… He studied English and American literature at Nottingham University before starting a career in broadcasting with the BBC… Tourism is his first novel. [Link]

Sounds like lad lit, if such a thing existed in any great numbers. ‘Puppy,’ really? He might as well have named him ‘Bittu’ or ‘Twinkle’

Here’s Londonstani by Gautam Malkani, due on June 22. The cover reminds me of M.I.A.’s stencil tigerstyle:

Here’s the UK blurb:
Set close to the Heathrow feed roads of Hounslow, Malkani shows us the lives of a gang of four young men: Hardjit the ring leader, a Sikh, violent, determined his caste stay pure; Ravi, determinedly tactless, a sheep following the herd; Amit, whose brother Arun is struggling to win the approval of his mother for the Hindu girl he has chosen to marry; and Jas, who tells us of his journey with these three, desperate to win their approval, desperate too for Samira, a Muslim girl, which in this story can only have bad consequences. Together they cruise the streets in Amit’s enhanced Beemer, making a little money changing the electronic fingerprints on stolen mobile phones, a scam that leads them into more dangerous waters.

Funny, crude, disturbing, written in the vibrant language of its protagonists - a mix of slang, Bollywood, texting, Hindu and bastardised gangsta rap - Londonstani is about many things: tribalism, aggressive masculinity, integration, cross-cultural chirpsing techniques, the urban scene seeping into the mainstream, bling bling economics, ‘complicated family-related shit.’ It is one of the most surprising British novels of recent years. [Link]

And here’s the U.S. version, exploiting fear of terrorism:

Gautam Malkani’s extraordinary comic novel portrays the lives of young Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men in the ethnically charged enclave of one of the biggest western cities, London. A world usually-but wrongly-portrayed as the breeding ground for Islamic militants is, in actuality, a world of money (sometimes), flash cars (usually), cell phones (all the time), rap music and MTV, as well as rivalries and feuds, and the small-time crooks who exploit them…

Gautam Malkani was born in West London in 1976. He was educated at Cambridge University and was appointed director of the Financial Times’s Creative Business section in 2005. He completed Londonstani shortly after the bombings in London last July. [Link]