Aasmah Mir

N.B. This event will now take place in the Bookshop.

We are honoured to welcome Sony Gold Award-winning broadcaster and co-presenter of the Breakfast Show on Times Radio, Aasmah Mir, to Edinburgh. She joins us to discuss A Pebble in the Throat, an eloquent and often heartbreaking memoir of Aasmah's childhood growing up in 1970s Glasgow.

I stare deeply into the faces of the people outside. It takes me years to understand something that was always true. These people are old and young, straight and hunched, kind and choleric. But they are not the same as us. And we are not the same as them.

Two generations, two places and two stories told in unison.

Capturing life from the lens of a vivacious child to a teenage loner, Aasmah candidly shares the highs and lows of growing up between two cultures, from the bullying she confronts at school to the comfort she finds in books, her little brother and Helen, her family’s Glaswegian guardian angel.

Intricately woven into this coming-of-age story is that of Aasmah’s mother, as we follow her own life as a young woman in 1950s Pakistan to 1980s Scotland and beyond. Revealing the injustices and limitations faced by both mother and daughter, A Pebble in the Throat is a sharp, warm and moving story of family, identity and finding yourself where you are.