“The Centre”, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
Published July 11, 2023
Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents’ generous allowance, and discussing the “underside of life” with her best friend, Naima. Anisa’s mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.
Adam begrudgingly tells Anisa about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees near-instant fluency in any language. Skeptical but intrigued, Anisa enrolls—stripped of her belongings, contact with the outside world, and bodily autonomy—and emerges ten days later fluent in German. As Anisa enmeshes herself further within The Centre, seduced by all that it’s made possible, she soon realizes the true cost of its services.
“To love without wanting to devour must surely be anorexic.”
The cover reeled me in, and I judged it so hard. I was expecting a bombastic story to go with how hard this cover is. And while it’s not a 5-star read, I think it’s still unique enough to deserve a day here.
The Centre is a sharp, unsettling debut that takes the polished surface of ambition and cracks it wide open to expose the rot underneath. The premise (and the cover!) is immediately gripping: Anisa, a struggling translator in London, is invited to join a secretive language program called The Centre, where students can master fluency in any language in mere weeks. If I were a character in this book, I would be first in line. Duolingo is fun, but if I could absorb a language faster than the 1,500 consecutive days I’ve been doing the exercise, you bet I’m taking that opportunity.
But what begins as an intellectual and professional dream soon reveals itself as something much darker, edging into the surreal and sinister. The author plays with the tension between desire and morality brilliantly—how much are you willing to give, or ignore, in order to get exactly what you’ve always wanted?
What struck me most was how the novel weaves horror into the mundane. I was constantly in the middle of the seesaw, not sure what genre I was reading. There are no jump scares or monsters lurking in shadows; instead, the horror is in the slow dawning realization of what’s been sacrificed, and in the unsettlingly smooth surface of The Centre itself. Siddiqi blends cultural critique with speculative fiction in a way that feels both fresh and inevitable, exploring colonialism, privilege, and the commodification of knowledge with a scalpel-sharp edge.
The reveal isn’t a huge mystery; you can guess it quite easily. But when it lands, the dread is total—not because it comes out of nowhere, but because you realize you’ve been complicit in looking away, just as Anisa has.
Content Warnings
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of content and trigger warnings.
cannibalism • racism • classism • sexism
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