Gifted Nikita Lalwani by Nikita Lalwani 9780812977943, 0812977947, B001EL6RAQ instant download after payment.

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.

“A triumph . . . fluid, original, clever, glitteringly vivid, funny . . . All the conventional pieties and forms of Indian immigrant identity and trauma are so wittily preempted, and yet there’s a sure grasp, at the serious core of the novel, of the deep reverberations of politics and history. I couldn’t bear it when it ended.”   –  Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom

Nikita Lalwani  Her first novel, 'Gifted' – the story of a child prodigy of Indian origin growing up in Wales – was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction. Her second, 'The Village', was modelled on a real-life ‘prison village’ in northern India, and won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her third novel 'You People' (2020), follows Tuli (the proprietor of an Italian restaurant) and his employee Shan who, having fled the Sri Lankan civil war, is desperate to find his family.