The Things That We Lost

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A thoughtful meditation on family, grief and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love.' - Good Housekeeping A deftly assured debut novel about a fractured family and how words left unspoken can be more devastating than the truth.' - Red Magazine

Though it revolves around family relationships and the grief they cause, the novel is multi-layered. Along with fissures in close relationships, you also dwell on race — what it means to a person of colour in England in the 21st century — and mental health. Were these themes integral to your vision of the novel? Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake(2003) was also a big one for me, as was Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (the story of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize). I’m also currently reading Gurnaik Johal’s collection of interlinked short stories (woven around migrants across generations), We Move (2022), which is brilliant. This precipitates a prolonged season of depression for Nik and his mother. She had already buried, rather than embraced, her grief at losing her husband, Elliot, years ago and now mourns her father as well.

What were the hardest parts of writing the novel?

The Things We Lost provides a dizzying view into a troubled woman’s past and present. Unfortunately, both lives are messy. Zaidi’s affecting memoir recounts his journey growing up in east London in a devout Muslim household. He has a secret, one he cannot share with anyone – he is gay. When he moves away to study at Oxford he finds, for the first time, the possibility of living his life authentically. The dissonance this causes in him – of finding a way to accept himself while knowing his family will not do the same – is so sensitively depicted. One of the most moving chapters includes him coming home to a witch doctor, who his family has summoned to “cure” him. This is an incredibly important read, full of hope. It was winner of the 2021 Merky Books New Writers Prize – Merky Books is a PRH imprint set up with Stormzy with a worthy aim to publish “bold voices from untraditional spaces that are inclusive and intersectional .. [and] .. to break down barriers in the publishing industry”. As an aside one of its very best publications was Derek Owusu’s brilliant Desmond Elliott winning “That Reminds Me”. The New Writers Prize is a key part of their strategy – aimed at “unpublished and under-represented writers aged 16-30 from the UK and the Republic of Ireland” and Patel, a UEA Creative Writing Graduate born in Paris and who grew up in NW London with Indian parents, won from some 2000 entries with an extract from what went on to be this novel. I want to take my time writing the next book, as I did with the first, because I enjoyed it so much and loved having the characters with me for all those years. It was such a joy taking the time to slowly discover who they were. I’m excited to do the same with the next set of characters too. The prologue had me hooked. Avani is introduced, and while I immediately had a sense of where the story of her past might be headed, it still grabbed me in, as I wanted to not only know if my instinct was right, but the details to be filled in.

Jerry is still struggling with his addiction but seems to be well on his way to recovery. He leaves red flowers on Audrey's doorstep with a note that reads "Accept the good," a phrase which Jerry himself had told Brian, and that Brian had subsequently said to Audrey many times. Audrey gets tragic news delivered to her door by the local police: Brian has been killed in an attempt to defend a woman who was being beaten by her husband. On the day of the funeral Audrey realizes that she has forgotten to inform Jerry of Brian's death. Her brother Neal delivers the message to Jerry and takes him to the funeral. I wanted to explore characters from this diaspora who belong to many places, or how children of immigrants sometimes feel they belong to a different place than their parents. Love is a big part of the story too, specifically looking at love within friendships, relationships and family, and the grief we experience when those relationships change or fade away.Audrey invites Jerry to move into the room adjacent to their garage, which he does. During his stay at the Burke home Jerry struggles to remain drug-free and also becomes very fond of Harper and Dory. The relationship between Jerry and Audrey is fragile and complicated. Jerry helps Audrey cope in many ways, including lying with her in bed to help her sleep. But Audrey, upset and confused, takes out her grief at Brian's death on Jerry. She becomes angry when Jerry helps Dory overcome his fear of submerging his head in the pool; something Brian had tried to do for a few years. Jyoti Patel has taken weighty themes and balanced them with lighter moments of humour, mystery and intrigue. The exploration of loss and grief is so painfully accurate it hits you in the pit of your stomach, but the overall effect is a novel full of heart and deeply moving. Several events skillfully continue conversations about race, brilliantly illustrating throughout the novel, how this can factor into interracial relationships, movement across the UK, identity, the workplace and culture. Nik has lots of questions about his late father but knows better than to ask his mother, Avani. It's their unspoken rule.

Alternating between the present day & a past that may or may not be real life, we learn about Madison’s unhappiness & her wish to see if different choices would lead to a better life, much like Jimmy Stewart’s character in the famed Christmas movie. But Madison soon learns this wish could have consequences with life-altering implications, like never being able to meet her beloved daughters in her new life (hello Butterfly Effect!). So I try to get out of thrillerville by choosing what I thought was a Sliding Doors/Maybe in Another Life style story. Yet what did I get? A quasi-suspense book that didn't even really come full circle in the end.Likewise, the development of Nik's character is handled with real insight and I thought it was especially powerful to feature a young man experiencing mental health issues. As with Avani, he is allowed to be a flawed, complex character and the spiralling of his emotions is painful to read about. His reaction to the loss of his beloved grandfather, followed by the sort of life changes which might be expected at his age but which can result in a fracturing of a protective, supportive framework, is so completely believable.