The subtleties of hospital hierarchy and the reality of life on an overstretched, underfunded (this is 2016) geriatrics ward are so vividly described you might wonder if Ali has spent the past ten years training to be a medic. It offers the sort of immersive reading experience that may remind you why you first fell in love with reading. Rich, insightful, soulful, with a cast of characters not easily forgotten, this is a traditional novel in the best sense of the word. could be the novel we all desperately need to read in 2022. Ali’s rendering of sibling-parent relationships is a masterclass in family psychology played out with subtlety, intellect and great humour. Heroes and anti-heroes fuse to create multidimensional characters who each evoke huge empathy. This may be true of us all but, when the full gamut of potential human behaviour is captured with grit and grace on the page, it truly elevates the literature to become a lens of enlightenment through which we can finally see ourselves. All the characters are flawed, capable of receiving and delivering hurts, and a bundle of contradictions. The beating heart of this novel is the author’s uncompromising scrutiny of the messy, heart-breaking, head-wrecking, brutal beauty of family dynamics.
Ali’s delicate unravelling of the secret burning threads that tie families in knots for generations is exquisite.
What we are also far too familiar with as a society is the painful reality of the dark secrets that often lay undiscovered beneath cultural silences such as these. his great archaeological dig to uncover what is at the heart of contemporary humanity truly delivers on the promise of what Brick Lane suggested might come next from Ali. The novel begins as a social comedy with the finely tuned cultural observations only found in the very best works of the East meets West literary tradition.
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