Hello dear friends,We’re heading into the holidays - and next week our topic is Bad Families from Jane Austen, just in time for our family gatherings for the US holiday, Thanksgiving Day. Stay tuned for that! But first, let’s talk about romance.Specifically, let’s talk about Muslim romance.The author Uzma Jalaluddin is well known in the Jane Austen world for her retelling of Pride and Prejudice. Her novel Ayesha At Last puts Lizzy Bennet - or Ayesha - in a large Muslim family in the Scarborough neighborhood of Toronto, where she’s navigating complicated cousins, domineering matriarchs, and the rituals of marriage proposals, all while hoping to find the time to follow her ambitions for poetry.Uzma Jalaluddin herself seems outrageously busy.When she’s not writing novels, teaching high school, and parenting, she writes a column for the Toronto Star about education, family, and life - it’s called “Samosas and Maple Syrup.”Ms. Jalaluddin’s latest novel is Hana Khan Carries On. It’s been optioned for the screen by Amazon Studios and writer-producer Mindy Kaling.In this conversation, Uzma Jalaluddin tells us how she discovered Jane Austen - as a teen, at the local library in the Toronto neighborhood she grew up in - Scarborough. That neighborhood is also the setting for both of her romcom novels, Ayesha At Last and Hana Khan Carries On. It’s a diverse, vibrant neighborhood that now her readers also feel right at home in - at least in our imaginations.Enjoy this podcast, available on Spotify and Apple, or by simply clicking Play, above. Check out the links to more Muslim women writers and artists below, send us other recommendations, and leave us a comment! And for those who prefer words to audio or like both, here’s an excerpt from our conversation:Uzma Jalaluddin I was - I am and was - a voracious reader. Growing up, I was constantly in the library. I was that kid who - the high school that I went to was right across the street from a large public library. And so during lunch breaks after school, I would just head over to the library and borrow books and hang out there. And I just studied there, I would just basically live there. And even my school library, of course, had a pretty good collection of books. And that's really where I was among my people, when I was in the library.Plain Jane And was that in Scarborough, Toronto? Uzma Jalaluddin That's right. It was in Scarborough. It's the Cedarbrae library, if any of your listeners are from Toronto. It’s a very large building,Plain Jane And shout out to libraries and librarians.Uzma Jalaluddin Oh my God, hashtag-library-love, I have so much love. And I think so many writers can relate to this, right? Like you become a writer out of a sense of, a love of reading. And I think I was a teenager - I must have been 15 or 16 years old - and I heard about Jane Austen. And I was one of those kids that just was like, “I want to read all the classics. I'm really interested. I'm going to try everything. I'm going to try reading Dickens and, you know, the Russian novels and Anna Karenina. And let me try Shakespeare,” and all of this. …So I picked up Pride and Prejudice, and I read it. And I remember the language was, it felt very old-fashioned to me. And it took me a while to get through it. And I did read it. And then I remember after I - because it takes a while, especially as a teenage girl, for it to sort of pick up ... there was something about that book that just stuck with me. And I kept going back to it and rereading it. And I'm a kid and then I'm a child of the ‘90s. So when the 1995 A&E  special came out, you know, I got the box set. And I would watch it. My mom watched it with me, it was this thing that we both really enjoy doing. And I think I've said this before, multiple times: But the books that you read when you're young, especially at those formative ages, the ones that you love, they just stay with you. Those stories just stay with you. And I feel like Jane Austen and specificall