This premise of this book, had me hooked from the very first page. The book is entirely told from the MC's perspective and she was a character that was relatable even when she wasn't likable. This was definitely a book where I felt the author was very familiar with the headspace of the MC and her experiences and it really showed.

I will never turn down a book about languages and I loved the musings on how translation impacts not only the translated works but also the translator. It's always fascinated me that certain phrases can't perfectly be translated to different languages and it changes the way you think in that language.

While there is sinister element to it and a mystery at it's core, it's definitely a slow meander to get there. Anisa's thoughts and observations about her world was interesting enough to make up for the slow burn and I really ended up loving this one.

Thank you so much to Zando Projects/ Gillian Flynn Books for the ARC of this one!

A language school that can make you fluent in a certain amount of time? I’m intrigued! I read this with curiosity. The writing drew me in. There was A LOT covered in this book, race, class, friendship..the author tried a lot to bring the beliefs across the pages. I first discovered this from Modern Mrs. Darcy and it didn’t disappoint.
Thank you to netgalley for the chance to read this e-arc!

THE CENTRE is an ambitious book that is damn near impossible to put down. Anisa is the best sort of heroine -- a little self-loathing but a little oblivious, kind of awful but trying to do good. Everything to do with the Centre itself was fascinating (though i wouldn't have minded the 'sinister' dial turned up a few notches!). Anisa's relationships with Naima and Shiba are compelling and fraught in interesting ways. This novel is very much BABEL meets NATURAL BEAUTY, though unfortunately it doesn't reach the effectiveness of either--it might be that Siddiqi is biting off a bit more than she can chew in one novel, as the book is really trying to explore gender, class, sex, language, translation, colonialism, immigration & assimilation, metanarration, and more in just a few hundred pages. The last third of the book was to me the most compelling, particularly as Anisa plays more and more obviously with form and what she's willing to tell us, eventually leaving the reader's position completely ambiguous. Are we reading her novel? Are we students at a new and improved Centre (or, shudder, the same one)? In any event, Siddiqi is certainly one to watch--I'll be first in line for her next book!

this book was definitely a ride. the main character, anisa, is very realistic and I loved spending time in her head. she doesn’t really know what to do with her life and talks mostly about her work as a subtitler and translator, then about the relationships she has with her best friend naima and with shiba (they annotate audre lorde essays for each other!!!!!!). ‘the centre’ tackles race and translation (!), as well as gender and immigration, which definitely made it interesting when it felt like the story itself wasn’t really moving.

the chapters are on the longer side, but the books reads so easily that I didn’t mind. the last few chapters sort of bothered me because they felt different from the rest, but i think that can be explained by the (very crazy and disturbing!) ending line.

when it comes to the queer rep, things were mostly implicit. it’s addressed two times that anisa is queer, and the ending is sort of open to interpretation but it’s implied that her and shiba end up together.

—thank you netgalley for the arc

Thank you NetGalley and Zando for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Centre is a contemporary speculative mystery/thriller detailing the life of Anisa, who works as a translator in London. She meets Adam, a man who seems to be fluent in an absurd amount of languages and ends up dating him—he tells her about a mysterious language learning center that promises fluency in ten days, and she ends up being invited to the super exclusive campus. And it's weird there! It demands a isolation and meditation for ten days in order to acquire the language, and from there Anisa's life is changed.

The atmosphere of the Centre (the school) is quite unsettling, and I enjoyed the parts where Anisa started asking questions about what's going on. This is a more character driven novel and Anisa spends most of the book being incredibly unmoored. I thought that she was an excellent character who felt very realistic in her struggles and her interiority. Anisa is in her 30s and is seeking fulfillment in her life; she is both callous and deeply sympathetic and Siddiqi has written her with a very strong narrative voice. There's a lot of interesting themes in here, too, including memory, language, class, assimilation, and human relationships.

Still, while I really liked Anisa as a character and thought there was a lot of interesting ideas here, the execution fell a little bit flat for me. The reveals were very interesting but I felt like they came quite late in the novel, leaving the ending feeling a little bit rushed. The second half of the book felt messy compared to the first half and I don't necessarily feel like things were built up properly. I did really liked the very last reveal, though, and I think it re-contextualizes the novel in an interesting way.

Overall a good debut with a lot of interesting stuff going on! It missed the mark a little for me and leaned a smidgen too contemporary fiction for me in tone, but still I think it's worth checking out!

the centre starts out seeming unassuming, anisa seems to be a pretty normal woman and her boyfriend adam is not the greatest guy for her but he’s not a bad person; his largest trait is how many languages he can speak, which is way too many for any regular person, and this makes anisa suspicious of his means for learning all of them. enter the centre, a secret and very prestige language learning facility that he has attended and that resulted in his fluency. anisa accepts a recommendation from him and decides to attend herself, to learn german. but the centre, despite the curiosity and oddity it originally poses, is even more sinister and secretive than you think. anisa slowly falls deeper and deeper into a relationship with her mentor, the programs manager, and in that time learns things she can’t unlearn, and becomes aware of the centers operations in ways she can’t forget. the twists and turns of this book had my jaw dropping and my mind spinning, i thought i had it figured out and boy i did not. this reads like a black mirror episode in the best way, and if you enjoy that show you will love this. there were moments where i felt like we jumped ahead in time a bit too fast, months gone by and summarized into a few paragraphs, but despite being left wanting more information, the vagueness and speed of the storytelling does lean into the thrill and secrecy of the story. i gave this a 4/5 stars! i recommend for anyone in the mood for a psychological thriller vibe! thank you to netgalley for an e-arc of this in return for a review!

3.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC!

The Centre is not so much a novel about a language centre as it is a novel about the varying relationships in our lives and their complexities. Anisa is a radical yet submissive character, who is invited on several occasions to reflect on herself and, just as her most recent partner informed her, the Centre would transform her irreversibly. However, this made me question - was it the Centre that transformed her or was it how she interacted with others that changed?

This was such an intriguing, well-paced read. I would recommend it for those who found Tender is the Flesh too transparent with its politics, for folks who enjoy character-driven plots, and for curious cats.

The Centre is a very unique novel combining contemporary literary fiction, suspense, mystery and horror. Anisa is a translator originally from Pakistan and living in London. She is a bit aimless subtitling movies and wishing to do something more "important". She meets Adam who is also a translator though he seems to pick up languages and be completely fluent in many of them. He introduces her to The Centre, an invite only language learning program for VIPs that promises fluency in 10 days. Anisa goes to The Centre hoping to find the secret to learning languages to translate great works of literature and gets pulled into trying to figure out The Centre's secrets.

This was a wild ride with turns I did not see coming. The pacing of the book felt slightly off with a slow middle chunk and then the ending was very rushed. However, it would make for a great book club book and I can't wait to talk with other readers about it.

This book is hard to describe. I was expecting a faster paced thriller type of book, and that is definitely not what this book is. The book is slow paced and provides wonderful insights into the mind of our protagonist. I felt I had a very strong sense of who Anisa is even if she doesn’t fully understand herself. One of my favorite aspects of the book was the peek into the life of a working translator- the subtleties of word usage, trying to be nonjudgmental about objectionable works, and uncertainty of contractor work. As the book progresses we have a few hints of what is to come but when the secrets are revealed I was stunned. An unpredictable book with lots of complex thoughts to tackle after the fact.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review. Sigh. This book was uneven for me. I wish I had enjoyed it more as the concept had potential. The first chapter was a little choppy but then it hit its stride for awhile. And then…cue record scratch…it lost it for me again, and also ended quite abruptly.

I am an absolute sucker for books about language and translation, and with the blurb for this story sounding slightly sinister, I was fully on board.

The Centre follows Anisa, a Pakistani translator living in London, beginning when she meets Adam. Adam is fluent—like, native speaker level fluent—in multiple languages. Intrigued, Anisa pursues a relationship with him. Now, the listed blurb for this book details things that don’t actually happen until well into the book, which I usually take issue with, but found I didn’t mind for this story. Anisa learns that Adam gained his level of fluency from a mysterious language school called The Centre, which promises fluency in ten days of intense study.

I had a really fun time with this one and was hooked right away. The story, characters, and pacing were all fantastic, and I finished the book in two days (a rarity for me). The narrative also asks the reader to sit with important questions around colonialism and appropriation in a way that felt unexplored. Even with the craze of R.F. Kuang’s Babel last year (another book using translation to ask these kinds of questions) this felt wholly original and new.

The book does makes two choices however (you’ll know them when you get to them) that really shift tone of the book. The first one I was fully on board with. It was one of those moments where the second it happens you think, “Of course! How did I not see that coming?” which I think is fantastic storytelling. The second one felt like a hard left turn and made the narrative feel sloppy and tonally unfocused. Because of the nature of the event, this could be intentional—its randomness making the reader feel adrift to mimic the narrator’s feelings—but it felt unpolished and not fully integrated with the rest of the story.

That being said, this was an impressive debut, and I’ll absolutely be anticipating Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s next book!

Anisa wants to translate works beyond the Bollywood movies that are her current work. When her new boyfriend (who speaks multiple languages with ease) seemingly becomes fluent in Urdu overnight, Anisa forces Adam to reveal how he was able to do this—the elite, invitation-only place called The Centre. But is Anisa ready to discover the secrets of The Centre?

I’m a linguistics nerd and fan of Bollywood so the premise of this book called out to me. However, it ended up not being the book for me. To me, it felt like the plot slogged in certain parts, would rush through other parts, had some twists sprinkled in and then just stopped.

At The Centre a handful of invited students can learn a new language in 10 days, just by listening to the language being spoken. In fact, they can not only learn, but become completely fluent.

Interesting premise, but this book suffered from what I consider to be a pretty significant mis-blurb. It was described as a dark and humorous work of speculative fiction. I did not find it humorous. I did not find it thrilling. I found it slow and indeed dark, veering into horror territory. Unfortunately this is the type of book I do not enjoy, and found the “twist” disturbing. I think the book would benefit from a more accurate description that would convey what to expect.

2 stars from me, although I’m sure there are Sci Fi horror readers out there who will embrace it.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and Gillian Flynn Books for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. The Centre is the story of Anisa Ellahi, a subtitler for Bollywood films who dreams of being able to take her career to the next level as a world class translator but, currently struggles to maintain her skills with just Urdu. However, her boyfriend, Adam, learns languages seemingly overnight and when Anisa forces him to share his secret, she is taken on a journey to a secret language school with lots of dark secrets and twists along the way.

This book starts out realistic and tame but, quickly becomes very mysterious and tense and finally, just dark. I kept reading because I had to find out the mystery behind this language school and how their learners picked up languages in only 10 days. I wish we could have learned more about this secret earlier in this story to further delve into the commentary around it but, I appreciate the slow build up. Plus, the reveal in this story was truly a bomb drop and I did not expect it at all.

Unfortunately, an element of this story that I struggled with a bit was just the characters. I did not really like any of the characters in this story and found their outbursts and dialogue just grating. There were some character storylines that were built out but, that I felt did not contribute to the momentum of the story and I struggled with this a bit.

All in all, this was a great fast paced story with bits of literary fiction and speculative fiction sprinkled in there. I think it would make for good discussion and despite some of the observations noted above, I’m confident that the twist in this story will stay with me for some time!

I received an ARC of this book from Zando Books and NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Anisa, our protagonist, dreams of success and fame as a translator of great works of literature, or at least something more impressive than the Bollywood films she's paid to translate. When she learns of a super-secretive language school that has unbelievable success in enabling its students to achieve fluency in a language in only two weeks using a mysterious and secretive method, she jumps at the chance to attend. Soon she is fluent in German and a successful translator of a wildly popular novel. But there is something about the Centre and its methods that draws her back, and she is determined to find out what it is about the methods it uses that makes it so effective. As she gets closer to discovering the truth and more involved in the lives of the people who run the Centre, she begins to question whether she really wants to know.

This is a page-turner in the best sense. Reading it feels like a conversation with the main character, a woman you come to care about a great deal over the course of the book. As a reader, you want to know more just as she does, but you also want to warn her from getting in too deep. And when you get to the end, you realize that maybe you never stood a chance.

Anisa is a 35-year-old translator living in London, subtilling Bollywood films. But she feels unfulfilled in her career, especially in comparison to her ex-boyfriend Adam, who can speak fluently in 5+ languages. After expressing these concerns, Adam tells her about an exclusive language learning school called The Centre. It's expensive and highly secretive, promising to teach any language fluently in a matter of 10 days. But like all mysterious institutions, this place harbors a dark secret.

"The Centre" is an immensely bingeable debut mystery from author Ayesha Manazir Siddiq. Basically, I read it within 48 hours and couldn't put it down. The beginning moves quickly, luring you in like The Centre does to our protagonist. Plus, ideas about relationship dynamics, cultural power and privilege, and the limits of language and authorship are peppered throughout. Fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Ruth Ware will enjoy this academic satire with a bit of bite.

I read this book quite fast—it starts quietly, but I was compelled to keep reading because I wanted to find out the mystery at the center of the novel. In the book, Anisa learns through a current boyfriend of a mysterious place called the Centre, where people learn a language fluently in ten days. She tries it out and befriends one of the people who work there.. in the process, her curiosity is piqued and she starts to pry into how the process works. More than a novel about languages and translation, the book also touched on topics like gender norms and class. The prose can feel a bit rambling at times, but it is clearly part of the style of the book.

The premise of this lured me in, but the writing style just wasn't for me, unfortunately. The plot was still intriguing and ingenious, but I couldn't fully gel with some of the narration. I know plenty of folks will find this and love it, though.

Thank you to Gillian Flynn Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title prior to publication. I heard about this book from Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide, and I was intrigued by the description and the cover. This is a story of Anisa, who wants to be a translator, and a secret school where one can be fluent in a new language in 10 days. Anisa attends this school and eventually learns the shocking secrets of how it works. This book reminded me a lot of Babel and Yellowface by RF Kuang and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I really enjoyed the commentary on India and Pakistan, language, translation, publishing, class, and appropriation. The twist is jaw-dropping, though now looking back I can see some clues. This was a captivating story that I won't forget anytime soon.

This book was very readable and compelling, so I would give it 4 stars. I finished it quickly, and it left a lasting impression on me. The only reason I wouldn’t give 5 stars is because there were some plot lines I wish ended more completely, with the protagonist and some of the characters. I did enjoy the relationships between the protagonist and her two friends, it touched on a lot of issues like friendship versus romantic relationships, and I found the conversations about race and relationships honest and enlightening. I think The Centre has a great blend of the thriller/suspense/mystery genre with well-written literary fiction prose.