I wanted to explore characters from this diaspora who belong to many places, or how children of immigrants sometimes feel they belong to a different place than their parents. Love is a big part of the story too, specifically looking at love within friendships, relationships and family, and the grief we experience when those relationships change or fade away.

There are other antagonists too, and Avani and Nik aren’t always their best selves. However, you get to know the pair well enough to realise that their behaviour while experiencing a series of significant upheavals isn’t representative of their whole characters. I could particularly identify with their feelings about Rohan’s house, which Avani has to empty and put on the market. Nik has been looking for father figures through his life, and now his grandfather’s gone he thinks of his stepdad Paul – however, he gets to see Paul through new, more adult eyes. Thank goodness for his good friends, old school and college mates and a couple of new university friends, as well as his friend Will’s dad, a found family he will be glad of. His growing anxiety and depression are not helped by being at university in a small, very monocultural city after growing up in multicultural Harrow, and we’re left hoping he’ll be able to transfer, as his cousin also did. Avani and Nik’s relationship is very believable, although I did feel a bit irritated with Avani sometimes for failing to open up to him and provide the answers about his father that he so desperately needed. In her maternal protectiveness, she didn’t seem to notice how grown up he actually was. There is an immersive and intimate quality about Patel's writing - from its portrayal of London teenage slang to the detailed depiction of British-Gujarati culture. Her characters have a depth that brings a poignant reality to issues around coping with grief, abuse and racial prejudice, and navigating family and friendship dynamics. An enthralling read." Breaking News.ieThat’s when I realised there was space in literature for characters who look and sound like me and the people I grew up with. This novel follows the Lees, a Chinese American family living in Ohio in the 1970s. In the opening lines, the omniscient narrator declares: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Lydia is the middle child, the favourite, whose body is soon to be found in a nearby lake. The narrator moves between the perspectives of each family member, weaving together the secrets each holds, allowing the reader to see the misunderstandings and miscommunications between them as they grapple with their grief and the mystery of Lydia’s death. I found the mystery of Elliot utterly compelling - in fact, I think I may have become almost as desperate for answers, and frustrated with Avani for not providing them, as Nik was! Even so, by the end, I could totally see why Avani behaved the way she did, as a result of blaming herself as well as wanting to protect her child from distressing knowledge.

I requested this debut novel by Jyoti Patel, who won the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize in 2021, attracted by its themes of family and identity. Although it centres on a young person, it’s not one of those struggling millennials novels but a story about generations and the stories they tell or don’t tell. It did not disappoint, and reminded me of Sairish Hussain’s “ The Family Tree” or Kasim Ali’s “ Good Intentions” with their multicultural and university settings.

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I wanted to follow a family torn apart by grief for six months, with flashes to their past, and see where they led me and what they had to say. The ending reflects this too —I metaphorically show how they’ve both grown, how Avani finally opens up to Nik. I leave them to it without having a neat and tidy conversation that wraps everything up because I don’t believe that would have happened in real life. It was also really important to me to show a young, brown man cry and be tender and be held by the men around him. Male platonic relationships really interest me because historically we haven’t really seen that so much in literature and art – how often do you watch a film or read a book where you just see a man putting his arm around his mate, or just laughing with him? Men haven’t been allowed the space to be tender with one another within fiction, really. An old BMW forms the eye of an emotional hurricane with Nik unable to understand why his mother is so determined that he should sell it. I only submitted one chapter to the competition and was still struggling to find my way through the second draft when I entered. An assured debut from a vital new voice. About family, grief and belonging, Patel weaves an intricate story that will stay with you.' - Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby and The Good Immigrant