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About the author
Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London born in 1998. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Saraswati is his debut novel.
Summary
'A debut collection of such precocity and aplomb that it stands comparison to the likes of Junot Díaz and Bryan Washington' Observer
'Moving, truthful, straight from the heart' Neel Mukherjee
'These are excellent stories, told with skill and verve' Jon McGregor
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022
A HINDUSTAN TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022
WINNER OF THE TATA LITERATURE LIVE! FIRST BOOK AWARD
Here, beneath the planes circling Heathrow, various lives connect. Priti speaks English and her nani Punjabi. Without Priti's mum around they struggle to make a shared language. Not far away, Chetan and Aanshi's relationship shifts when a woman leaves her car in their drive but never returns to collect it. Gujan's baba steps out of his flat above the chicken shop for the first time in years to take his grandson on a bicycle tour of the old and changed neighbourhood. And returning home after dropping out of university, Lata grapples with a secret about her estranged family friend, now a chart-topping rapper in a crisis of confidence.
Mapping an area of West London, these stories chart a wider narrative about the movement of multiple generations of immigrants. In acts of startling imagination, Gurnaik Johal's debut brings together the past and the present, the local and the global, to show the surprising ways we come together.
Foreword
A debut brimful of the music and movement of multicultural London, to stand besides White Teeth, Brick Lane and The Buddha of Suburbia
