This novel was written as a reflection of real life. That was really important from the start. I didn’t want to think too much about writing into a genre or plotting their story against specific arcs in a writerly way where the primary focus is to leave the reader warm and cosy and satisfied. We then immediately move to Nik, trying to find his grandfather in hospital, as he had been moved. You sensed the closeness they had from the off. We then move through various points in time. Some are present day, some scenes are from the past. It melds into a story that is done beautifully well in my opinion. This novel is extremely far-fetched, and I'm sure the author realizes this, but I could see that being a turn-off for some readers. The first few chapters drew me in, then it got slow, but I really enjoyed the ending and I think the author did a perfect job wrapping things up. I hope to see more novels from this author in the future. In recent years, there has been a spate of novels by writers of Indian descent. Could you name some of your favourites?

Nik struggles with how white his university town is, which is totally at odds with the diversity of London. I saw that you went to uni in Norwich, which is quite a ‘white’ area. Did you have a similar experience to Nik at uni? Though it revolves around family relationships and the grief they cause, the novel is multi-layered. Along with fissures in close relationships, you also dwell on race — what it means to a person of colour in England in the 21st century — and mental health. Were these themes integral to your vision of the novel?It was winner of the 2021 Merky Books New Writers Prize – Merky Books is a PRH imprint set up with Stormzy with a worthy aim to publish “bold voices from untraditional spaces that are inclusive and intersectional .. [and] .. to break down barriers in the publishing industry”. As an aside one of its very best publications was Derek Owusu’s brilliant Desmond Elliott winning “That Reminds Me”. The New Writers Prize is a key part of their strategy – aimed at “unpublished and under-represented writers aged 16-30 from the UK and the Republic of Ireland” and Patel, a UEA Creative Writing Graduate born in Paris and who grew up in NW London with Indian parents, won from some 2000 entries with an extract from what went on to be this novel. I didn’t have a super clear idea of which direction the novel would go in when I began writing, but I knew that these themes would be integral. It’s something I find myself drawn towards as a reader and as a writer – to the way untold truths take root between friends, lovers, families. In my debut novel, The Things That We Lost, I explore a family history through the eyes of a British Indian mother and son, Avani and Nik, as Nik tries to uncover the circumstances of his father’s death.

The novel has two main protagonists – Nik(hu) and his mum Avani, and is partly set in the second half of 2017 as Nik prepares for his first term at University (studying History at an unnamed Northern seaside University) and part across Avani’s earlier life. The Prologue has her at University in 1990 studying Mathematics and also introduces us to her then boyfriend and future father of Nik – Elliott – from a poor and abusive white family and her older brother Chand. I wanted to write a novel that depicts life as it is — the good bits and the bad. Both mental health and race were topics that were showing up in the non-fiction I was reading but I couldn’t find a great deal of fiction looking at brown men struggling with mental health, or that looked at the experiences of the Gujarati community that settled in London.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. London is also written so well, if you know it you'll have a strong visual of that hill in Harrow and the school children with the straw hats, (if you don't then take a fellow Londoner's word for its accuracy!) 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. The story opens with the narrator’s father leaving her with the Kinsellas, a couple who live on a farm in rural Ireland. Cautious at first, the compassion she is shown by the couple draws her closer to them. She is bathed, fed, loved, and told, fervently, “there are no secrets in this house”. Except there are, or rather, there is one, sitting quietly behind the couple’s tenderness towards the girl. It’s the memory of their dead son, whose clothes the narrator wears to mass, whose room she sleeps in. A subtle, beautiful tale, all the more powerful for its succinctness. The thing that really stood out for me in this book is Patel's representation of second - and third generation 'immigrant' families and mixed-race relationships in contemporary London; something that we haven't really seen enough of in literature given the prevalence of people in London (the setting of this book) with our vast array of varied inheritances and the mixing pot of our friendship groups from school onwards.

This is a big book, full of assured and affecting writing. Secrets spill and relationships sour, sacrifices are made and promises are broken, as plot twists propel the narrative forward to a dramatic finale. Like Nik, the reader is on a quest for the truth: what really happened to Nik’s father? Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake(2003) was also a big one for me, as was Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (the story of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize). I’m also currently reading Gurnaik Johal’s collection of interlinked short stories (woven around migrants across generations), We Move (2022), which is brilliant. The Things That We Have Lost" follows the lives of mother & son, Avani & Nikhil. Following the devastating loss of their beloved Dad/Grandad, secrets from Avani's past stirs up a desire within Nikhil to learn more about his deceased father, much to Avani's dismay. The story is told over the course of the 80s, early 90s & the present day. The reader is taken through the whirlwind of Avani's teenage years, her marriage, the untimely death of her husband, her grief & the loss of her father. Avani's story is beautifully interwoven with Nikhil's story which is essentially a coming of age story; The difficulties of navigating race, belonging, grief, mental health & relationships. The Things That We Lost by Jyoti Patel is a poignantly rendered novel of family, loss and secrets, and the depths we go to protect those we love— and ourselves. Overcome by the recent death of his beloved grandfather, Nik turns to question the mystery surrounding the unexpected death of his late father, Elliot, who passed away before he was born. So begins a gentle unravelling of the layers of family history and painful secrets carefully masked by Nik’s mother, Avani, piece by piece, until both mother and son reach a tense precipice that threatens to fracture their entire relationship. As Maddie navigates this new world, she realizes she is the product of her own unhappiness. But is this new do-over exactly what she needs, even if it means never seeing her daughters again?The central theme of this story is that in one timeline, a close friend of hers died while they were at university. In the new timeline, that woman is still alive. There are some circumstances surrounding what happened involving another previous boyfriend that were never really clear to me, even when I got to the end. The story devolved into a weird suspense tale, but it's pretty clear from the start who the culprit is, yet the motivations aren't defined until the end and even at that point, they didn't make much sense to me. Audrey gets tragic news delivered to her door by the local police: Brian has been killed in an attempt to defend a woman who was being beaten by her husband. On the day of the funeral Audrey realizes that she has forgotten to inform Jerry of Brian's death. Her brother Neal delivers the message to Jerry and takes him to the funeral. Halle Berry gives her best performance since "Monster's Ball" (yes even better than "Catwoman"). We feel her happiness, pain, desperation and hope. The cute kids are played by an amazing 11 yr old Alexis Llewellyn and Micah Berry (not her real life son). Also strong is Alison Lohman, who just doesn't work enough these days. However the strongest performance is by Benecio. I am not sure if the role was written for him or if he just perfectly captures best friend Jerry. It is most complicated role and requires enormous depth. The story is told from two perspectives: Avani and Nik through a dual timeline. In the past we meet a young Avani and are given an insight into Avani’s relationship with her own mother and how she met Elliott. In the present Nik is trying to uncover the truth about his family but also live his own life. The prologue had me hooked. Avani is introduced, and while I immediately had a sense of where the story of her past might be headed, it still grabbed me in, as I wanted to not only know if my instinct was right, but the details to be filled in.

Zaidi’s affecting memoir recounts his journey growing up in east London in a devout Muslim household. He has a secret, one he cannot share with anyone – he is gay. When he moves away to study at Oxford he finds, for the first time, the possibility of living his life authentically. The dissonance this causes in him – of finding a way to accept himself while knowing his family will not do the same – is so sensitively depicted. One of the most moving chapters includes him coming home to a witch doctor, who his family has summoned to “cure” him. This is an incredibly important read, full of hope.

Jyoti Patel has taken weighty themes and balanced them with lighter moments of humour, mystery and intrigue. The exploration of loss and grief is so painfully accurate it hits you in the pit of your stomach, but the overall effect is a novel full of heart and deeply moving. While the similarities between our experiences end there, my feelings towards this novel only grew deeper. Jyoti Patel has beautifully captured the impact that those who are no longer with us leave behind. She has thought of it all. The inner conflicts, the misunderstandings, the things that are said because the things we want to say go unsaid. The grief that is carried alone because misguidedly, we think it will be a burden to share with others. The weight of Maddie's guilt doesn't fit with what unfolded with Gina. At a party, Maddie didn't stop Gina from leaving with her abusive boyfriend and later dies in a mysterious accident. The narrative falls flat because it was Gina's CHOICE to leave, not Maddie's. Maddie had no direct impact on Gina's death. So that begins a weak story following Maddie on this mad path to fix her bad choices. The alternate story line takes a bonkers approach, swapping out Maddie it seems for someone entirely new, who deserves every bad thing that happens because of her horrific decisions. What was the silly story line with her and Brain supposed to do? Turn her into a murderer? I liked how the story came full circle, but the story made little sense. Though there is a greater focus on Avani and Nik, the mother and son (who grew up in England at different times in its history: Avani, a young British Indian, in the London of the 1980s, and Nik in post-Brexit-referendum Britain), the relationships between Avani and his mother and brother also propel the narrative. Did you set out to explore the multiple dimensions of the ties that bind us: mother-son, mother-daughter, father-daughter, etc?