A Sudden Storm

Author Bali Rai is well known for his wide range of hard-hitting titles covering topical and challenging subjects and has worked with publishers Barrington Stoke on many of these, offering important reading matter in an accessible format for all young readers.

Arjan is a Sikh teenager, growing up in this world where not everyone can accept the beliefs and cultures of others. On his sixteenth birthday, coming home from school, Arjan crosses paths with a couple of men, who see only his dark skin and turban as marking him out as different from them and confront him with aggression & racist threats. Although shaken by the incident, Arjan spends time with his family before heading out to meet his friends for a celebratory evening at the cinema, but on their way home, the racists return in a larger group and chase him and his friends out into the night away from safety. When Arjan finds himself scared and alone, surrounded by the thugs, things come to a shocking and tragic end.

This story stayed with me for a long while after reading it, knowing that this sort of event and the prejudice behind it is unfortunately still a reality in our world, despite its apparent multi-cultural nature. Although what happens in this story is handled sensitively, the powerful and emotive tale is a thought-provoking read that should hopefully encourage the reader to ask more questions about where and how this prejudice and hatred arises and what we can do to help to deal with it.

Rai’s book was inspired by a tragic event in 1997 where after a group of friends were racially abused and attacked, the body of a 20-year-old man, Ricky Reel, was found in the river Thames a week later. This fictional version of similar events in A Sudden Storm is no less shocking.