What begins as a mystery involving a key quickly becomes a search for identity and connection in Jyoti Patel’s debut novel The Things That We Lost. For 18-year-old Nikhil, a recent loss in the family dredges up questions about the father he never knew; questions that his mother, Avani, refuses to answer.

The story is told from the dual perspectives of Nikhil and Avani, jumping between the present, where Nikhil struggles to deal with his grief and adjust to life at university, and Avani’s own young adulthood in the 80s and 90s. As their parallel stories unfold, the similarities between mother and son subtly present themselves, making the breakdown in their relationship all the more heart-rending. Correlations appear also in their experiences. Decades apart, they receive the same dirty looks and comments, and we see how they are caught between Gujarati and English culture, both being ‘Indian in the only way [they] know’. 

The Things That We Lost is a beautiful novel; it feels real and honest, with characters that seem to lift off the page and come alive. Nikhil’s life and student experience are so familiar that he seems like a mate, while Avani could be a friend’s mother, both kind and distant. At times she comes across as selfish and cold, at others she appears small, vulnerable and afraid. When the true reason for her grief is revealed, it is done quietly and artfully, without unnecessary melodrama. The vibrant characters Patel creates gives this moment the impact it needs; there is even a sense of tenderness as though we are there to comfort Avani as she revisits a difficult memory.

Themes of grief, family and identity dance and mingle across the pages like a melody, inextricable from one another. They are there in Nikhil’s idolisation of his absent American stepfather, in his adolescent dramas, and in his hostile relationship with his uncle Chand, whose own struggle with family and identity is hinted at throughout. Despite its heavy subject matter, The Things That We Lost is a book bursting with love. As a reader, you can’t help but fall in for London’s multiculturalism, with the sounds of Gujarati, and, most of all, with Avani and Nikhil themselves.

Jyoti Patel: The Things That We Lost is published by Merky Books on Friday 12 January.