"Cool, comic and searingly satirical, this potent debut sees a Sri Lankan taxi driver experience loss, lust, rage and betrayal as she hustles her way through life in the city."
As fresh as fiction comes, Priya Guns’ Your Driver is Waiting is nothing but brash and brilliantly inventive. Offering incisive commentary on immigration, race and the struggle to survive in an inequitable society, it tells a madcap tale of great divides, with an across-the-divide romance cutting through its core.
Dry-as-a-bone funny, Damani is one of those who are struggling to survive. She cares for her mother and works all hours as an underpaid driver to (just about) stay afloat in a city that’s all-but exploding with protests. The diversity of placards tells you everything you need to know about the scale of unrest, from “Working-Class People of the World Unite” and “BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER”, to “Refugees are people!” and “Climate Justice is Gender and Racial Justice”.
In this tinderbox, Damani picks up Jolene as a customer. She’s a rich white social worker who comes from the kind of world in which people have summer houses and friends with villas in Italy. The intense pull between them is palpable. To Damani, “If Jolene was anything, she was the sun. Perfect at a distance, but up close she could hurt my skin”.
As things turn out, it’s not long before things shift to Damani describing Jolene as “a flower withering before my eyes. She was courageous, bold and ugly”. After gaining Damani’s trust, after Damani has worked to see beyond her white privilege, Jolene delivers an unforgivable blow that shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was “like the rest of them”, despite her façade of doing good and being different.
Honest, fiery, and fearless, Your Driver is Waiting is a whip-smart, wild ride of a novel, with potent social resonance.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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