THE INHERITANCE

Sheena Kalayil (Polygon, £8.99)

Rita Kalungal, daughter of Catholic Indian parents (they celebrate Easter, but with a biryani), was always considered a “dutiful, obedient” girl. In fact, one of the reasons she chose to study at a University far from her parents’ London home was so that she could explore the side of herself that wasn’t. But having an affair with her personal tutor, a married man, is several steps beyond anything she ever imagined doing.

Still, for all the guilt that comes with the affair, and the pain that follows, it becomes an initiation into adulthood for her. After she and tutor Ben Martin have started sleeping together, she accompanies her parents on a holiday to their old home of Kerala and feels at one with the land for the first time: “the lushness seemed to mirror her lushness; the sensuous warmth complemented the sensuality she felt”.

But Sheena Kalayil turns our expectations on their head by killing off Ben Martin before we, or Rita, have really got to know him. The professor and his wife die together, in a car crash. While Rita is wrestling with her grief, Ben’s brother Francois, a painter who has flown in from Lisbon for the funeral, finds a camera in Ben’s flat with a single picture of Rita on it. He realises that his brother has been having an affair and decides to track down the young woman in the photograph, which doesn’t prove that difficult. Meeting Rita, he sympathises what she’s going through and feels a responsibility to shelter her until she’s ready to face the world again. Inevitably, he finds he is falling in love with her.

Both a rites of passage novel and a romance, The Inheritance shows Rita introduced to the adult world by being thrown in at the deep end and having to gain wisdom beyond her years to come to terms with it. And it’s not only about Rita’s grief and guilt, or Francois’s grief and longing, but the interplay between three families: Rita’s, Francois’s and the family of Ben’s late wife, who get wind of the fact that Ben was cheating on her and call into question his suitability to have a foundation named in his honour.

The Inheritance shows Kalayil capable of adeptly spinning a complex web of themes which aren’t always interacting in an obvious way but do enrich the story. Having spent his early years in Zimbabwe, Ben, a white male academic, wrote books which gave women of sub-Saharan Africa a voice. Francois, as a painter, wants to “show African themes through a Western prism”. Their agendas set up an uncomfortable tension with their adoration of Rita, the product of another former British colony, a tension which is magnified as the meaning of the title – The Inheritance – sinks in.

A delicately written, optimistic and very involving novel, it’s a story that spans Britain, Portugal, India and Africa, as Rita rises from the ashes of a tragedy and learns to appreciate the intricacy and interconnectedness of human relationships through more understanding eyes.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT