‘A tale of patience, tenderness and love that’ll add sunshine to your year.’
-Stylist (best non-fiction, 2021) 

‘A beautiful, refreshing and honest memoir about family, love, inheritance and loss that is warm and authentic’ - Nikesh Shukla

How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Paperback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 3 February 2022 / £9.99

You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.

If only it were that simple.

Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it comes to marriage.

Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.  

As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?

As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.

ABOUT Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). Her collection of stories, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love (Sceptre, Nov ’21), has been described as ‘deft, satisfying and poignant’ (Pandora Sykes).

A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times, Independent, Observer, Grazia, Red, Harpers, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.

Selected Praise for How We Met

‘A sweet, touching memoir about family, faith and love. There's a purity and simplicity to Huma's writing, as she attempts to reconcile the sprawling weight of expectation with her own desire for a contained but free life. But what does a life on her own terms look like? What even are her own terms?  A consolation to others who have trod this very path, enlightening for those of us who haven't, you'll be rooting for not just Huma, but for everyone she loves too.’ Pandora Sykes

‘I just loved loved loved loved How We Met. A love story about panic, faith, family, duty, living on your own, work, grief and trust. It delves into love and politics in the British South Asian community and left me beaming.’ Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic Years

‘This beautiful, romantic memoir grabs you from the first page and won’t let you go. Told with heart, wit and quiet restraint, How We Met is the story of how we can transcend the expectations of others and arrange our own happiness in life and in love.’ Viv Groskop

‘A wonderful read - a memoir of grief, becoming and true love. Huma Qureshi is a writer with a sharp eye and a romantic heart.’ Katherine May, author of Wintering

'I devoured this brilliant memoir! Huma's voice is effortless, beautiful, incredibly refreshing and so relatable. I highly recommend it' Haleh Agar, author of Out of Touch

‘There are the books that touch you. Then there are the books that open out their arms and straight out hug you - How We Met is this second kind of book. Honest, joyful, at times heart-breaking, at times laugh out loud funny, but always generous in its telling... this is Huma Qureshi, heart and soul.’ Ami Rao, author of David and Ameena

‘A fearlessly honest memoir of courage, love and loss, and trying to find your place in the world. Quietly heart-breaking but life-affirming too.’ Kia Abdullah, author of Take It Back

‘Every page radiates Huma’s love for her family, for her emerging self, and for the possibilities of a life more fully lived’ Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story

‘Huma Qureshi tells the story of her great loves with generosity and tenderness that will grab readers by the heart.'  Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of This Really Isn't About You

'How We Met is the book I, and countless women of similar heritage, have been waiting our whole lives for. I cried and laughed out loud as I recognised myself in so much of Huma Qureshi's story.’ Saima Mir, author of The Khan

‘I loved every minute.’ Laura Pearson