[7] She won a scholarship to a private girls’ school, but on the condition she chose arts subjects at A-Level, which frustrated her ambition to become doctor.
Once her children were at school, she borrowed books on chemistry, biology and physics from a library, studied them for three to six months, and passed the graduate entry exam for medicine.
2 on their list of "Eighteen Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer";[15] it was also nominated for the International Muslim Writers Awards 2011.
[16] Farooki's novels have been published in English internationally (in the US and Canada, UK, Australia, India, Singapore) and in translation in a dozen languages across Europe.
[8] She continues to work full time as an NHS doctor, specialised in Internal Medicine, alongside her writing and lecturing.
[8] She currently lives in southwest France and southeast England with her husband and four children,[4] twin girls, older daughter and son.
[19] Farooki's novels have been critically well received, and she has been compared to other British female novelists, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith,[3] and Monica Ali.
[8] In an interview with the Metro in 2010, headlined, "Nationality is Not The Issue", she said she was flattered by the comparisons, but said that a key difference was that she had made a deliberate decision not to focus on cultural clash in her novels, and to write universal stories.