Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It

Yet another spellbinding book of which I first heard an extract at the Asian Writers Festival 2018.

Deepa Anappara is a journalist who spent a long time investigating cases of children going missing in the bastis (or slums) of Indian cities – where (as Anappara notes in her Afterward) as many as 180 children are said to go missing every day. But within the restrictions of news articles, she could never find a way of conveying the “resilience, cheerfulness and swagger” of the children she encountered during her investigations.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is her attempt to put that record straight. When their friends from school start to go missing, and the police seem wholly uninterested in helping the distressed families, nine-year-old Jai and his friends Pari and Faiz decide to take matters into their own hands and conduct their own investigation. Jai is an avid watcher of police dramas on television and is sure that he knows exactly what needs to be done. But will their zeal just bring them into danger themselves?

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line takes horrifying statistics of missing children and personalises them, reminding us that, for each and every one, there is a family grieving.

“Inside that house sadness sticks to me like a shirt damp with sweat on a hot summer’s day.”

The child viewpoint here is wonderfully drawn and Anappara has indeed captured the irrepressible cheekiness of her protagonists. But don’t be fooled. This is not the Famous Five transported to a unnamed Indian city, and the evil that lurks in the basti is no comic book villain who could have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids. The journalist in Anappara knows the truth is far darker than that.

As the story unfolds, it takes in the vast gulfs of inequality in modern Indian society, the fragility of life in the basti, and how suspicion leads only too easily to sectarian mistrust and, ultimately, violence.

A heart-breaking story that nonetheless captures the joyous resilience of children living on the brink.

Longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021

You Will Enjoy This If You Loved: The Baby Ganesh Agency series by Vaseem Khan, Freedom by Catherine Johnson, Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories of missing children; child narrators

Perfect Accompaniment: Dahl and roti

Genre: Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction

Buy This Book Here

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is a joyous patchwork quilt of a novel, celebrating seven generations, and over a hundred years, of Black British womanhood.

It begins with Amma, radical lesbian feminist playwright who now, in her fifties, finally has a play on at the National Theatre. From her, the narrative fans out, through family and friends, chance encounters and hidden connections.

There’s Yazz, Amma’s daughter, to whom her radicalism is out-dated and rather quaint. Dominique, her friend, survivor of an abusive relationship with another woman. Carol the successful banker, Bummi her highly educated Nigerian mother who worked as a cleaner to give her daughter the chances she never had. Shirley the uptight teacher. Morgan who self-identifies as gender-free. Hattie who has spent her life running a farm in a remote part of the north of England. Grace, her grandmother, daughter of an Ethiopan sailor she never met...

Evaristo plays with sentence structure – eschewing a lot of punctuation and capitalisation, and instead putting separate sentences and clauses and phrases on separate lines, so the whole thing is presented rather like an extended prose poem. You might think this would make it difficult to read, but in fact the brain adapts and the text flows perfectly .

Just as our eye is drawn across the pattern of a quilt, we are drawn from story to story by juxtaposition, while the bigger picture is formed by harmonies and contrasts of tone and shape. It’s a fascinating book – one that led more than once to my reading far too late into the night, as I finished one story only to be sucked into the next.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker 2019. And I will be sorely disappointed if this book does not make it to the shortlists of both the Women’s Prize and the Jhalak Prize in 2020.

UPDATE: We at Bookmuse are delighted that not only did Girl, Woman, Other win the Booker Prize, but it is now shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Break by Katherena Vermette, Subjunctive Moods by C G Menon, Smash All The Windows, Jane Davis

Avoid If You Dislike: Defying the rules of punctuation

Perfect Accompaniment: Impossible - each story deserves its own!

Genre: Literary Fiction

Buy a copy here.