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About the author

Nikesh Shukla is a published author, award-winning filmmaker and internationally touring performance poet. His writing has been featured on BBC2, Radio 1 and 4, Resonance FM and the BBC Asian Network. His work has been published in Tell Tales, Litro, Bad Idea and Transmission Magazine and he has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Apples and Snakes, Soho Theatre, The Big Chill, Rise Festival, the London Mela and Glastonbury.

Coconut Unlimited is Nikesh’s debut and as-yet unpublished novel, and this extract is taken from the very start of the book.

Synopsis and inspiration for Coconut Unlimited

The idea for the book was born out of my wondering what happened to my fourteen-year-old self, stuck in the Harrow suburbs, desperate to set the world on fire in a rap band. Inspired by Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and The Inbetweeners’ brand of deluded high jinks, I wrote this semi-autobiographical look at that time.

Coconut Unlimited is set in 1994 at a predominantly white private school in suburbia. Three desperately uncool Indian kids – Amit, Anand and Nishant – sick of being judged as posh private-school toffs by their Indian peers and being judged as pakis by their white peers, decide to ‘keep it real.’ They do this by setting up a hip-hop band called Coconut Unlimited.

However, perilous school corridors, nonsensical amateur drug dealers, drum n bass DJs, and their own lack of musical talent stop them from actually making any tunes. The book follows a year in their school lives as they try to write mind-blowing rap tunes, escape the suburbs and get their school tormentors to realise just how effing cool they are.