Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of "great works of literature," but mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies and living off her parents' generous allowance. Adding to her growing sense of inadequacy, her mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, has successfully leveraged his savant-level aptitude for languages into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret. Adam begrudgingly tells her about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees complete fluency in any language, in just ten days. This sounds, to Anisa, like a step toward the life she's always wanted. Stripped of her belongings and all contact with the outside world, she enrolls and undergoes The Centre's strange and rigorous processes. But as Anisa enmeshes herself further within the organization, seduced by all that it's made possible, she soon realizes the hidden cost of its services.
Ingenious ... It’s not just the skeletons lurking behind the ivy-covered walls of the institute that make the novel so propulsive — it’s also what The Centre has to say about class and the interplay of language and identity ... A novel that knows that whether you’re trying to place an errant foreign word or unlock a dark secret behind a pedagogical miracle, context is key. This is a book whose many delights and horrors are unlikely to be lost in translation.
Fantastic ... Siddiqi’s easy storytelling and her heroine Anisa’s sweet narrative voice slip down like summer rosé. Siddiqi...has the gift of maintaining propulsion and mystery, while keeping things human and realistic, and it’s lovely to see the world through the eyes of an intelligent, sensitive and sincere protagonist.
Inventive ... Th[e] third act is where the plot begins to come apart at the seams ... Informs the current social discourse by offering wry, shrewd insights into colonialism, appropriation and classism.
