CVK
The Guardian reviews the new book The Bloodstone Papers by Glen Duncan, who has a lot to say about the current penchant in the U.K. for mixed race writers:

Glen Duncan is a writer from a Catholic, Anglo-Indian background whose previous novels have dealt with sexual guilt, dark mortifications of the flesh and reincarnations of the devil. That’s the Catholic side of his upbringing taken care of: what’s surprising is that he has drawn little attention to his Anglo-Indian heritage.

It’s partly literary saturation which accounts for this: Duncan revealed that he originally conceived a mixed-race protagonist for his 2003 novel, Weathercock, “but took that element out because in the meantime there was Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru and I didn’t want to seem to be jumping on a bandwagon. I will write about it one day, when it’s not so fashionable.”

His latest book does feature a mixed narrator named Owen Monroe, who is also a writer. Duncan isn’t afraid to poke fun at the publishing industry within the book:

There’s a telling scene in which Owen has lunch with a jaded publisher who says: “The market’s in love with mixed race just now, but the market gets bored quickly. What you want is: Anglo-Indians - who are they? What are they like? But you do it through the burglar or the bent detective. There’s a crime and mixed-race vein no one’s tapped yet.”