ABSTRACT
In January 2004, daytime television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan launched their book club and sparked debate about the way people in Britain, from the general reader to publishers to the literati, thought about books and reading. The collection addresses questions of authorship, authority and canon in texts connected by theme or genre including the postcolonial exotic, food books, and domesticity. The nebulous boundaries of belonging engendered by a colonial past and a nomadic present position the writers in a place labeled the postcolonial exotic by Graham Huggan. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan notes that his reading of a particular text relies on the construction of a Western model reader who views African literature, through the distorting filter of the anthropological exotic. It appears that, the popular postcolonial novel must lend itself to being read as fictional romance and educational non-fiction, the latter tempered in the romance that delivers an optimistic closure.
