REVIEWS for Gifted

Compelling, heart-wrenching, and laced with redemptive hope. Lalwani’s touching, funny, finely calibrated novel brings [things] alive with urgency and poignancy… and in doing so becomes a paean to a vanished childhood.
Souma Bhattacharya, The Observer 2007

Subtle, comic, heart-breaking, Lalwani’s first novel brims with insight on education and migration, but even more on parents and children. The climax, in Oxford, will stand comparison with Hardy’s Jude.
Boyd Tonkin, Books, The Independent, 2008

The measurements of the world become brilliantly, fascinatingly known through mathematics, but Lalwani’s characters struggle to comprehend the boundaries of their own lives, which are unstable for the teenage Rumi as well as her parents, who have been uprooted from the familiar geography of their native India… Lalwani compellingly depicts the pain and pleasure of breaking the rules.
Anita Sethi, New Statesman 2007

Lalwani’s evocation of teenage dislocation is pitch-perfect and she inhabits her heroine’s interior world with tender authority. The generational clash between Rumi and her parents - captured with precision and empathy - derives from the fact that her ethnicity and her genius make her special and therefore she stands out, yet she wants to be just like everyone else.
Sarfraz Manzoor, The Guardian 2007

Lalwani wrings both pathos and comedy out of the power struggles conducted by people who love one other. The three central characters are vividly real – solid, flawed, appealing, despicable, admirable, pitiable, clever, foolish. One turns the pages not so much for the plot as to become better acquainted with these people – and to savour the well-crafted, literary prose.
Brandon Robshaw 5-star review Independent on Sunday, 2008

Lalwani’s singular achievement is that she touches our souls without pedantic moralising or exhortative homiletics. Rumi’s parents are believable monsters, they lurk in all of us. The spunky, captivating Rumika—gifted without doubt but adorably ordinary at the same time—is also someone we have sighted and sighed over, in ourselves or in our children. And Lalwani is certainly a gifted writer, Booker or not.
Brinda Bose, India Today 2007

Arresting..[a] coming of age story full of the mingled love and anger that animate families of every culture.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post 2007

Lalwani has a talent for pacing and surprise, and her novel is a page-turner… [She] infuses all her characters with humanity, and that makes Gifted a layered and nuanced story about the choices a family (immigrant or not) makes for a gifted child.
Kathryn Masterson, Chicago Tribune 2007

Gifted is full of stunning descriptions of childhood. Lalwani subtly renders the movements of Rumi’s brightly perceptive inner consciousness by tinting the world in mathematical hues, endowing even apparently simple sights with an almost magical scientific beauty.
Scarlett Baron, Oxonian Review 2007

Not the least of Nikita Lalwani’s achievements in this superb debut novel lies in her ability to present the tragedy of a gifted second-generation immigrant girl within the framework of larger throes…The novel is especially memorable for its sensuous power. Lalwani not only knows her characters’ minds: she is able to record, in wincing detail, events within their very mouths.The searing narrative is unflinchingly and tenderly written, in every sense of the word tender.
Stevie Davies, Author, Independent on Sunday 2007

REVIEWS for AIDS SUTRA

“An intelligent, often compelling collection of essays by noted Indian writers, demonstrates that workers on the subcontinent dealing with the disease often confront similar problems…. This important book should be read…not just by physicians, health officials and members of nongovernmental organizations but by any compassionate reader.” -Los Angeles Times

“Provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into a disease that is either sterilized by statistics or ignored altogether.” -Time

“Finely observed.” -The Economist

“What better way to give a voice to the 2.7 million people in India living with HIV/AIDS than to enlist the country’s top authors to tell their stories?” -Reuters

“The range of essays is truly impressive.” -BBC News (online)

“The writers here offset the numbing anonymity of numbers with portraits of stunning particularity…. The writing in the anthology is by turns tortured and beautiful as [they] show us the people behind stereotypes.” -The Wall Street Journal

“A cautionary volume that stresses the need to educate, treat, and create jobs…. A forward by Nobelist Amartya Sen and an introduction by Bill and Melinda Gates both argue that we must cease stigmatizing and blaming hapless victims if we are to find real solutions.” -Kirkus Reviews

“Sixteen writers, including Salman Rushdie, spotlight the normally hidden crisis of AIDS in India…. Prashant Panjir’s poignant accompanying photographs sound another powerful wake-up call to the global health community and beyond.” -Booklist

“These ‘untold stories from India’ humanize the tragedy…. The book succeeds because it is not sentimental: the writers respect the victims, admire their courage. With humility, expatriates make the arcane accessible. Those based in India have a refreshing candor.” -The Independent (London)