With real life therapy sessions included at the end of each short chapter, Spare Burden is the first in a series of memoirs called Life Out Of Reach focusing on the life of JAS Dosanjh. Born in the UK, as one of six daughters of Sikh Punjabi immigrants, hardworking and obedient she dreams of becoming a journalist and working on Fleet Street. Though gifted with a sixth sense, Jas’s life and the life of her five sisters is ruled first by their horrid grandfather who hates girls and then later by her strict parents. In a culture where boys are revered and celebrated, she is constantly told that daughters are burdens and unwanted. Jas and her sisters are told not to trust white people, they are not allowed to talk to boys or Muslims nor are they allowed to go out on their own. She lives in a close-knit world where men and women have traditional roles and where the behaviour of girls and women is controlled using the concepts of duty and honour and where shame and shameful situations are to be avoided at any cost. Jas’s mother is beaten with a rolling pin by her father for speaking to a male neighbour and when one of Jas’s aunts NAVI is discovered to have a Muslim boyfriend, he is stabbed to death. Even as Jas tries to rise above the religious and cultural conflicts she experiences at home, by making friends with Muslim girls at school, she encounters prejudices and bullying, caught in the middle as the rival gangs of Sikhs and Muslims clash. At the age of sixteen, her plans to study at university and forge a life of her own choosing are derailed when she returns home from school to a houseful of friends and relatives who are in the midst of celebrating an event – to her horror and dismay Jas discovers that the event everyone is celebrating is her engagement and Jas is expected to marry without any say or protest, JAY the boy her parents promised her to when she was only six months old. In a modern 1980s Britain, will Jas decide to quietly accept her fate, as all of her aunts and female cousins have done before her, or will she fight for her right to live her life the way she chooses? The second book Not The Property Of continues the story on from the day of Jas’s surprise engagement.