THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE STRANGE TIMES by Adam Foulds

GIFTED by Nikita Lalwani

CHILD PRODIGIES ARE an intriguing, unsettling topic. Isolated from their peers by prodigious mental gifts, and often oppressed by well-meaning but overbearing parents, their lot often isn’t a happy one.

These themes link two accomplished and confident debut novels, The Truth About These Strange Times and Gifted. In Adam Foulds’s tale of two outsiders, ten-year-old Saul, a memory whiz who can recite pi to a thousand decimal places, is stressed out by his insensitive father’s intense training schedule for the World Memory Championships.

Howard, a well-intentioned and rather simple 28-year-old Glaswegian friend of the family, fears for Saul and makes the fateful decision to remove him from the pressure-cooker environment. We then get a rather offbeat road trip which rollercoasters to an inevitable conclusion.

In Gifted, Rumi is a girl born to Indian immigrants settled in Cardiff, is picked out as an exceptional mathematician at the age of five and subjected to a strict study regime by her ambitious father. She detests her social isolation and despises her domineering parents and things come to an explosive head when she is accepted into Oxford University at 14.

Although both books deal with the weight of expectation placed on the shoulders of prodigies, they do so with a refreshing blast of dark humour, the two authors revelling in the bizarre circumstances in which their characters find themselves.

Nikita Lalwani does a good job of getting inside Rumi’s mind, as we journey with her from the innocent child with a love of numbers to the frustrated teen, addicted to chewing raw cumin seeds and trying to grow up in a family that won’t let her.

Foulds chooses to leave Saul as more of a blank canvas, delivering the narrative mostly from Howard’s viewpoint, a decision that produces more comedy through the narrator’s haplessness, but slightly detracts from Saul’s effectiveness as a character.

Of the two books, Gifted is clearly the more autobiographical. Lalwani uses her own background as the child of immigrants to address the relationships between generations in a new country with a depth and passion that is compelling. But some of Foulds’s characterisation seems a little unsure (Howard’s Glaswegian dialect and internal musings, for example, don’t always ring true).

Another minor criticism is that both books take a while to get going. It’s only with the apparent abduction of Saul by Howard that things really pick up in Foulds’s novel. Likewise, Gifted takes on a new lease of life when Rumi makes it to Oxford, and the conflict between her cosseted life and the freedom she sees all around finally reaches breaking point.

But that’s a small quibble. There is much to admire in these debuts, from the assured descriptions to the well judged blend of comedy and drama.

The Truth About These Strange Times by Adam Foulds

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99; 324pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

Viking, £16.99; 273pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (free p&p)

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