Neha is dying. When she finds out she has been diagnosed with the same terminal cancer that killed her mother, she turns to what she knows best - computers and data. She deals with her grief by creating a programme which traces her family history - a vast amount of data on when and how everyone in her family has died, going back generations, in an attempt to predict, or perhaps cheat, fate.

The story begins with Neha's parents, Mukesha - an awkward young man who mistakenly arrives in Yorkshire when he arrives in the UK to study in London and Nisha, the girl across the road from him. Their story is funny and heartwarming, showing the struggles of first generation immigrants to the UK during the 1960s.

We also see chapters from the perspective of Rakesh, Neha's brother as he is grieving his mother and sister. A hipster comic trying to forge his way to fame, he both exposes and exploits the racism that he and his family faces. We see Raks pressured to play into stereotypes to advance in the industry and navigating his identity as a British-Asian comedian.

In the background we see Ba - Nisha's mother, is looking after her two young grandchildren after their mother has passed away. She is trying to work out how to connect to two English children who have no knowledge of Kenya.

Shukla interweaves the stories of the different generations and family members in a tapestry of heritage and destiny, exploring how the past shapes the future, and how we can't escape our histories. Jumping between time, perspectives and places - from Yorkshire to Kenya and New York, the book never feels overly complex, seamlessly tying together a family's trauma, and grief. Yet at the same time The One Who Wrote Destiny is witty, funny and incredibly tender. It deals with death and grief, race and identity, and ultimately belonging.

“You forget you’re living. And it’s only in the brief moments after you remember to cherish what little time you have, that you do anything to take life by the hands and dance as though no one is watching.”

The publishing industry isn’t always fair; sometimes – maybe, too often – I come across a book that’s an absolute gem but has not received the recognition it so richly deserved. And, so, we have Nikesh Shukla’s achingly beautiful, The One Who Wrote Destiny, a fantastic, passionate and revealing examination of mortality, destiny and the experience of immigrants to the UK.

This was published two years ago, back in 2018, but I have only just got around to reading it (the burden of the TBR pile) and, oh, what I would have given to have had this in my life earlier. It is a brilliantly executed novel that captures all the insight into the experience of immigrant communities in the UK – the racism, the clash of cultures, the hostility, the questioning of ‘home’ – and wraps this up in a novel that follows three generations of the same family as they live their lives, ever aware of what they have inherited and their ever-evolving battles to live their lives in peace.

The story is centred around a wider Gujarati family settled in Bradford with roots in Kenya. We start with Mukesh, an awkward young man who arrives in the UK in the 1960s and promptly falls in love with Nisha, the young woman he is completely smitten by. Only the path of love does not run smooth: Nisha is terminally ill with cancer and the racist hate mobs are circling.

Yet this is a novel with as much wry humour as insightful analysis; take this little gem on the married couple eating a curry: “This was food we had never experienced before, food that we had certainly never cooked or eaten at home. Yet it was being culturally packaged as our own. Our country had existed for only about thirty years at that point and already its cuisine was world-famous.”

But though Nisha dies, this isn’t before she gives birth to a boy, Raqs, and a girl, Neha. Only, later in life, Neha too is diagnosed with the same terminal cancer that killed her mother and so she embarks on a driven mission to fathom what is destiny and what is coincidence. And this journey will bring her into scientific and analytical mind into open conflict with the beliefs of her ancestors for whom destiny governs much.

“It is not for us to question the one who writes destiny, only to honour their wishes.”

This novel is so brilliantly written, various themes so effortlessly blended together – the different experiences across the generations of racism hitting the head, the bonds of family hitting the heart. And all this in a novel with a strong narrative drive that also gives time for the characters to develop and reveal themselves before our eyes. Absolutely gorgeous.

I've heard wonderful reviews about this book but unfortunately I struggled to engage with the characters. It's a book which I have put down for now, but hope to pick up again in a few months when hopefully it'll read a little better for me. (On a separate but related note - Nikesh Shukla's Twitter account is excellent and everyone bookish or politically minded should follow him)

A beautifully written account of three generations of the same family and their attitudes to destiny. It’s incredibly moving but stark and unflinching in places too - especially in relation to Neha’s experiences with death. Would recommend.

At the centre (although not the start) of this story is Neha – the daughter of Mukesh, who came to England from Kenya and is Indian. She has discovered that she is dying from the same lung cancer that killed her mother and, among other things, decides that she should find out more about her family, about who they are and where they come from. Her father often tells the story of how he and Nisha, his dead wife, met but this isn’t enough for Neha – she needs something more. The story moves back and forth – from Mukesh’s rather stylised and sentimental telling of the ‘how I met your mother’ tale, to how Rakesh, Neha’s twin brother, copes with her death. Finally we meet Ba, the twins’ grandmother, and hear about the one time she meets the children – when they are left with her for a month after she has returned to Kenya. The stories intertwine – and are told from each person’s perspective so we see each one’s (not always flattering) view of the others – but the theme of identity and immigration run through them all. Destiny is also ever-present – partly in the idea of what will happen to a person in the end, how they will die but also in the idea of what kind of person they become in life.

I think this was an interesting book in my quest to understand those who are immigrants. I particularly liked the fact that, overall, nothing much happened. This was a book about a family – their lives, their illnesses and their deaths. Although they met with racism and prejudice this was something that happened to them not who they were. Nobody was radicalised, or had an arranged marriage. No-one became a doctor or lawyer (and thus a ‘good immigrant’). They were always just a family…

This is the story of a family who move from Kenya to the UK in the 60s and how their expectations of life in this country are very different to the reality. The book alternates between different members of the family and shows the different attitudes of the different generations throughout the decades.

A large part of the issues they face is based on race, ranging from ignorant comments to agressive attacks and the author does a great job of highlighting what poc have to deal with on a daily basis.

A great story about family, which also raises important issues.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this book.

A family saga of repeating patterns of illness, loss and immigration. Often moving and funny, this is a novel about destiny and whether we have any control over our lives.

Nikesh Shukla has created some wonderful characters: Mukesh arrives in Keighley from Kenya in the 1970s to start a new life in London (!) and is bewildered to find himself the victim of race-hatred and violence while trying to fit in to the small local community. His English isn't colloquial and he only has one decent suit, but then he falls in love with the feisty Nisha, the love of his life. So much so that after she dies, he fails to appreciate his own children. In the next generation we have their children: Rakesh, a wannabe comedian and his twin sister, Neha, a fascinating female character who (like someone in TV's The Big Bang Theory) is a computer nerd, completely out of touch with her feelings. When she develops cancer (like her mother) she tries to plot the destinies of her whole family, in what for me was the most moving part of the novel. Finally we meet Ba, Nisha's mother, who briefly looks after her grandchildren when her daughter dies. She has experienced the most loss in the novel, and is only waiting to die and re-join her family. The One Who Wrote Destiny is laced through with terrible obsessive sadness, in spite of some very funny passages. The casual racism at all levels is shocking, but there's also desperately sad male violence directed at family members (and donkeys).

If I have a criticism it's that Nikesh Shukla doesn't take his material far enough. We soon know the basic 'story', so that by the time we reach Ba's chapters at the end of the novel, we already know what has happened and there aren't any big reveals. I was left with the impression that there are some fascinating and memorable characters in this novel, and it's a heart-wrenching story, but I didn't feel it as much as I would have expected.

I wanted to read this book because I adored the author's previous book, Meatspace. I had felt immediately at home with its milieu - even to the point of recognising a real-life location in Shoreditch.


There was no such sense of reassuring familiarity with this novel, its introduction dealing as it does with the dislocation felt by a recent emigrant from Kenya. Things didn't really get any easier when we transitioned to his daughter, whose misanthropy made her a rather unsympathetic character in spite of the tragedy of her personal circumstances.

I was on surer ground with her brother Raks, who had the saving grace of being funny (well, he is a stand-up comedian). But little that went before prepared me for the jump back in time to the twins’ grandmother ‘Ba’, which is where the various strands really started to come together for me.

This part of the book is beautifully written and hugely moving. By the end of her story I was feeling emotionally bereft - which is, I think, a sure sign of a really good book.

Most readers, like me, probably encountered Nikesh Shukla first as the editor of The Good Immigrant, but he's also a novelist in his own right. The One Who Wrote Destiny is his third novel, and it's distinguished by its verve, humour and thoughtfulness.

When Mukesh left Kenya in the 1960s, he imagined himself studying as an accountant in London - not getting dragged into amateur dramatics and race riots in Keighley. However, this unlucky turn of events did lead him to meet his future wife. A generation down the line, Mukesh's two children tell their own stories. Neha, obsessed with programming, is dying of lung cancer before she feels she's had a chance to really live, while her twin brother Rakesh is trying to launch his career as a stand-up comedian while not having to always talk about race. Meanwhile, both twins wonder what happened to their Ba, who looked after them in Kenya when they were young, but who they haven't seen since. All four of these characters narrate their own sections of the novel, but their narratives are interspersed with bits from secondary characters who briefly intersect with their lives, which both adds interesting variation and can feel a little choppy.

At its best, The One Who Wrote Destiny is both funny and thought-provoking on questions of race, cultural identity and heritage. Much of the best material is showcased in the sections of the novel narrated by Mukesh and Rakesh, and the relationship between father and son is also very well-drawn. Mukesh finds it difficult to understand his son's anger over things like 'girls wearing bindis at parties' after the racial violence he experienced as a young man. Rakesh struggles with how to position himself as a comedian, knowing that while his material on race is often warmly received, he could also be accused of selling out. His sister Neha is his fiercest critic, arguing that he makes white people laugh about things that they ought to take seriously. But despite the generational gulf between Mukesh and Rakesh, their bumbling clumsiness, both physical and emotional, means that they share a strong family resemblance.

It's in its smaller examples of cultural appropriation that The One Who Wrote Destiny can feel a little derivative and repetitive. Shukla seems to be in direct conversation with his edited collection The Good Immigrant throughout the course of this novel, and occasionally this jolted me out of his fictional world, making me feel that I was hearing the author's voice, not the characters. Some of these details work better than others. A riff on the silliness of 'chai tea' - 'tea tea', as one of the characters put it - is instantly recognisable from Shukla's essay in The Good Immigrant but becomes a clever thread throughout the novel that links different characters. Other instances of repetition feel a bit lazier - one of the characters thinks very similar things to Shukla about the appropriation of 'namaste'. Another character, who's an actor, complains about always being cast as 'wife of a terrorist', which is familiar from 'Miss L's' essay in The Good Immigrant. Shukla is generally very good on detail, so I wasn't sure why he felt the need to repeat this material.

The One Who Wrote Destiny is uneven and structurally messy (the last section feels especially tacked on), but it's full of such energy that I sped through it. I'll definitely be turning to Shukla's backlist.

What I really enjoyed about this book is that I felt it really demonstrated what it means to be living in between two different worlds. I think it brought to life loneliness and struggle and the importance of relationships and how those relationships impact us, despite our environment, and play roles in our futures.

I enjoyed this. It is revealing and galling and funny and sad. Essentially The One Who Wrote Destiny shows us the messes we make, for each other - iin the broadest terms, as a result of colonialism, of ignorance, of assimilating, and in the smallest, among our families - and how we all seem to be tied into something hectic greater than any of us. We have to 'muddle through and try not to fuck it all up for everyone else.

Nikesh Shukla's latest literary escapade is sweet, exploring familial ties and how fate plays a role in this family. The narrators include terminal cancer patient Neha, Kenyan-born father Mukesh, and hapless comedian brother Rakesh, each playing a role in their so-called pre-determined destinies.

The writing is witty and it's always wonderful to hear voices that represent BAME communities in modern Britain. But unfortunately it is a little thin in plot and storyline. It is a host of voices speaking about their perspectives and intricately joining together. An easy read.

Adored Meatspace but maybe it was the formatting that meant I struggled to separately voices of characters. I couldn’t follow who was talking and didn’t feel I could continue. Sorry - no review from me on this occasion.

The One Who Wrote Destiny is a compelling novel about three generations of one family and their destinies, successes, and failures. It opens with Mukesh, who moves from Kenya to Keighley in the 1960s expecting to find a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and instead finds a foreign and strange place, racism, and the love of his life. Neha, Mukesh’s daughter, is a logical computer programmer and she’s also dying whilst trying to avoid telling her father or her twin brother, Rak. Rak’s a stand up comedian who is facing the fact it might not be his jokes, but who he is that is causing his career problems. And finally, Ba meets her young grandchildren for the first time and has to care for them, but Neha and Rak are used to England, not Kenya, and Ba is haunted by the deaths in her family.

The characters are endearing and interesting, reflecting on their personal situations and also on more systematic issues around race, immigration, and difference. The novel is held together by the stories and certainties that families hold close, for example their tendency to die of certain things or their belief in something or another being their destiny. Neha’s portion of the narrative is perhaps the most engrossing, with her specific view of the world causing her to try and organise her family’s deaths in categories whilst dealing with her family, her cancer diagnosis, and her almost-romance with a girl in her local bar. Both Neha and Rak’s sections of the story are set in the modern day and this allows Shukla to highlight different forms of oppression and cultural identity today, from comedy panel shows to tautology.

This is a novel that is both crucial and heartwarming, with great characters and a carefully woven narrative. It foregrounds the importance of language and place in a variety of ways, from the languages characters do and don’t speak to the ways people frame their lives and their homes using words. and raises important points that arise in the lives of its characters. It is undoubtably a big novel for 2018 that is current and clever.