In her stunning debut novel, Nikita Lalwani pits a parent’s dream against a child’s, exploring how much can be endured in the name of love.
Rumi Vasi is 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes, and 6 seconds old. She’s figured that the likelihood of her walking home from school with the boy she likes, John Kemble, is 0.2142, a probability severely reduced by the lacy dress and thick woollen tights her father forces her to wear. Because Rumi is a gifted child, and her father, Mahesh, believes that strict discipline is the key to nurturing her genius if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country.
Nikita Lalwani
About the Author
Nikita Lalwani credits a book by another Booker Prize shortlistee, Gerard Woodward’s I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (2004), as the novel that shifted her own view on what fiction could be.