The Things That We Lost

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The thing that really stood out for me in this book is Patel's representation of second - and third generation 'immigrant' families and mixed-race relationships in contemporary London; something that we haven't really seen enough of in literature given the prevalence of people in London (the setting of this book) with our vast array of varied inheritances and the mixing pot of our friendship groups from school onwards. There are other antagonists too, and Avani and Nik aren’t always their best selves. However, you get to know the pair well enough to realise that their behaviour while experiencing a series of significant upheavals isn’t representative of their whole characters. I could particularly identify with their feelings about Rohan’s house, which Avani has to empty and put on the market.

Sorry for starting at the end but the book itself sort of starts with an end. The Things We Lost tells the story of Avani, her son Nik, her husband Elliot and their families. There are great themes of loss and bereavement, light touches on racism and the differences between multi-cultural London and whichever northern town Nik chooses to study in. There's an examination of the challenges of holding onto your friends when your lives start to diverge - and that's for both mother and son. 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. I remember at the time I was listening to podcasts and reading books like The Good Immigrant, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race . One thing that kept coming up was this idea that we stay in cities because when we go out to very rural towns, we do feel ‘othered’ in some way. I realised I hadn’t seen that experience represented so much in fiction. The reason why I don’t name the town Nik goes to is because I’ve heard so many stories about people who go to [less diverse] uni towns who have experienced the same thing, and I wanted it to be universal. I will have readers say to me, ‘that’s definitely Durham’, ‘that’s definitely Exeter’, ‘that’s definitely Norwich’, ‘that’s definitely Lincoln’. It’s so interesting.Nik, moving to university following the death of his beloved grandfather, is desperate to know more about the father who died before his birth. On the afternoon of his grandfather's death he tells Nik that only Chand, his uncle, would be able to give him the story. Nik knows his mother never talks about his dad but he does not know why. Even the basics of how his dad died are confusing. I wanted to quietly hint that, potentially, Avani’s mother sees her daughter with a sense of freedom and liberation and essentially happiness that she wasn’t afforded herself. But she doesn’t quite know what to do with that, and it comes out as resentment and abuse. I mean… I feel like I could write a whole other novel about this.

This book was featured in the 2023 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others). At first, I really didn't like Maddie at all or any of the characters really. They are all self-centered and flawed. As the story progresses, you see immense growth within Maddie and I ended up really loving her character, and I really wanted her to find happiness. This book is at heart an exploration of two things – grief and growing up in a multicultural family. 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.a b "Things We Lost in the Fire (2007) - Weekend Box Office". Box Office Mojo . Retrieved 2007-10-25. The story is told through the perspectives of both Avani and Nik. How significant was it for you to keep these two strands distinct?

Maddie's current life is crumbling. She loves her two young daughters. but her marriage to Nathan isn't working out. Her husband is having a midlife crisis and has pulled away from his wife and girls, leaving everything to Maddie. Desperate, Maddie starts an affair with Jayson at a writer's conference. The story opens with the narrator’s father leaving her with the Kinsellas, a couple who live on a farm in rural Ireland. Cautious at first, the compassion she is shown by the couple draws her closer to them. She is bathed, fed, loved, and told, fervently, “there are no secrets in this house”. Except there are, or rather, there is one, sitting quietly behind the couple’s tenderness towards the girl. It’s the memory of their dead son, whose clothes the narrator wears to mass, whose room she sleeps in. A subtle, beautiful tale, all the more powerful for its succinctness. It was released on DVD and HD DVD on March 4, 2008. A Blu-ray version was released on March 24, 2009.I read the melancholic title of this book and the allusion to a sliding doors romance in the description, and I made up my mind about what this book journey would be—a little sad but full of romance and feel-good do-overs. But instead, The Things We Lost by Maggie Giles was full of twists, suspenseful, insightful, and a little dark. Stott was brought up in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect in which her father was a high-ranking minister. Despite this, he hides copies of Yeats and Shakespeare’s poetry and keeps a radio, all of which are forbidden. Then he leaves, taking his family with him. As he is dying years later, he asks Stott to finish the memoir he started, and the result is a deeply moving account of their family story, as they build a home in a world they’ve been taught to fear. This is a daring debut with a wide scope of themes bravely depicted within. Here you will encounter grief and loss, relationships, family friction and enduring love as the narrative alternates between the present day and the past. But to me, the story felt long and winding. There were too many details about things which i didn't care to know about. The pacing also could have been crisper and shorter. There are indeed some intrigue and thrill elements to the story; but they don't manage to keep the reader completely interested. And I can't say I loved where the story went and how it ended. I would have liked a different ending with Maddie learning some more lessons. The Things That We Lost is a beautifully tender exploration of family, loss and the lengths to which we go to protect the ones we love.