Fifteen-year-old Fawad Chaudhry loves two things: basketball and his mother’s potato and ground-beef stuffed parathas.

Both are round and both help him forget about things like his dead father, growing up in Regent Park, and his mother being hell-bent on arranging his marriage to his first cousin, Nusrat, back home in Pakistan. Not to mention his estranged best friend Yousuf who’s coping with the shooting death of his older brother. Yeah, it’s complicated.

But Fawad has plans; like, asking out Ashley, even though she lives on the other side of the tracks, and saving his friend Arif from being beaten into a pulp for being the school flirt, and like making the school basketball team and being the second brown dude ever to get drafted into the NBA.

Now if only he could convince his mother to let him try out for the basketball team. Or that first-cousin marriages increase the risk of genetic disorders in babies and that he really likes Ashley. And if he could only get Omar, the neighborhood bully, to leave him alone.

Ghettostan is an #ownvoices coming-of-age story, following Fawad through success and failure, love and loss as he navigates complicated friendships, first love, an overbearing mother, and the death of his father.