Ayesha at Last

Uzma Jalaluddin's Ayesha at Last, published in 2018, is set in Toronto. Ayesha Shamsi has set aside her ambition to be a poet and taken a teaching job so that she can pay off what she owes her wealthy uncle, and she lives with her large Muslim family, where the conversation keeps returning to her younger cousin Hafsa, who is close to turning down her hundredth marriage proposal, and to Ayesha herself, who is lonely and has no wish for an arranged match. Khalid then arrives in her life: clever, handsome, and quite as conservative and quick to judge as she had feared.

The novel is a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and has been compared with it, and it moves that structure into a contemporary Muslim community in Canada. Jalaluddin began the book while she was pregnant with her son Ibrahim and only decided to finish it when he was seven years old.

Ayesha at Last was Jalaluddin's debut novel. It was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards and for the Stephen Leacock Humour Award, shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and it won a Hearst UK Big Book Award selected by Atlantic Books; the film rights were acquired by Pascal Pictures in August 2018. Jalaluddin's second novel, Hana Khan Carries On, was published in June 2021.