Any Other Business

Some rules are written down. The ones that matter aren't.

Tanveer Abbas has always believed that the world makes sense if you read the instructions carefully enough.

After nineteen years navigating land records, regulations and government bureaucracy in Lahore, he moves his family to Ashenby, a small village in Northumberland, convinced that Britain should be relatively straightforward. It is, after all, a country of institutions.

There will be rules. There will be procedures.

There will certainly be a list.

Except Ashenby doesn't seem to work that way.

The bins go out at a time nobody has written down. Invitations don't necessarily mean you're invited. People help one another without discussing whose responsibility it is. The pub has its own invisible geography. And the parish council has rules that everyone appears to understand differently.

Naturally, Tanveer buys a binder.

While his wife, Nusrat, seems to find her place without needing instructions, his children learn to navigate identities their father is only beginning to understand, and his formidable mother demonstrates that speaking English may be entirely optional, Tanveer sets about decoding the unwritten rules of English life.

But the harder he tries to understand belonging, the more complicated it becomes.

Because being included isn't quite the same as belonging. Being correct isn't always the same as being right. And sometimes becoming part of a community has nothing to do with getting your name onto the right list.

Sometimes you simply have to turn up.

Warm, sharply observed and quietly hilarious, Any Other Business is a deeply human novel about family, immigration, community and the peculiar ways strangers become neighbours.

Perfect for readers who love witty, character-driven British fiction, unforgettable protagonists, intergenerational family stories, small communities and humour with an emotional heart.

For anyone who has ever arrived somewhere new and wondered how everyone else already seems to know the rules.