prodigy of Indian origin growing up in Wales—was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction. Her second, The Village, was modeled on a real-life “prison village” in northern India, and won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Lalwani wrote the opening essay for AIDS Sutra, an anthology exploring the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in India and is a trustee of the Civil Liberties Trust, a human rights organization.
Her new novel is You People.
At the Guardian Lalwani tagged ten books in which there is "'intense feeling' in fictional friendships where there is no carnal activity," including:
Sula by Toni MorrisonRead about the other entries on the list.
Long before the fever and dream of Lila and Lenu in Elena Ferrante’s epic Neapolitan novel series, and the haunting “imaginative empathy” offemale friendship in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, we had Sula and Nel busy dancing all over societal notions of class, race and marriage. Set in a black community in the Ohio hills between 1919 and 1965, where white gentrification is encroaching fast, the book circles around the bond between the pair as they become women. Hurt each other they do and must, but the power they exhibit together comes from their difference and the paradigm-altering questions they bring to the table. The ending, calamitous yet liberating, is a masterful study of regret.
Sula is among Lucy Jago's five best female friendships and John Green's six favorite coming-of-age books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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