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Summary
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize
Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Desmond Elliott PrizeA teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again.
Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she comes and goes and goes and comes, until, one day, she doesn't. Silence becomes Ruby's refuge, sheltering her from the weather of her mother's mental illness and a pressurized suburban atmosphere.
Plangent, deft, and sparkling with humour, Somebody Loves You is the fiction debut from Forward Prize-winning poet Mona Arshi, and a moving exploration of how we choose or refuse to tell the stories that shape us.
Author Notes
Mona Arshi was born in West London, where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer with Liberty for a decade before receiving a master's in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection Small Hands was published in 2015, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Mona Arshi regularly appears on BBC Radio 4. Her poems have been published in The Sunday Times , The Guardian and the Times of India and most recently the London Underground.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and former human rights lawyer Arshi (Dear Big Gods) makes her fiction debut with a delicate and enveloping portrayal of a British Indian family coping with a mother's depression. "Everything worth saying can be written on your fingernail," believes Ruby, the narrator, who, at 11, rarely speaks. Her older sister, Rania, is a talker, a rebel, and an artist. Their father is unassuming and kind, and their mother, who feels most alive while gardening, sleeps her way through Britain's winters. Ruby and Rania, while starkly contrasting, provide each other the support their mother cannot, especially when she's recovering at a psychiatric hospital. Adults project their own beliefs onto the silent Ruby--some distrust her, while others, such as a teacher, seek to convert her to Christianity. However, as Ruby moves from primary to secondary school, her devilish tenacity takes root. The chapters, like Ruby, are concise, never rambling, but they contain startling depth. With piercing lines such as, "The day my sister tried to drag the baby fox into our house was the same day my mother had her first mental breakdown," Arshi opens the door into Ruby's dysfunctional but authentic family. Each scene is packed with emotion and memory, and it's all carried by the diction and imagery of a poem. It adds up to a beautiful whole. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
Somebody Loves You is reminiscent at first of an old home movie shot on Super 8 film, the colours saturated but barely in focus: jump cuts from toddlers waddling in snow suits to a garden, a kitten, a blue bowl. This is the camerawork of memory in action, what childhood recollection chooses to emphasise. But from the second page, there is something bigger looming outside the frame: "The day my sister tried to drag the baby fox into our house was the same day my mother had her first mental breakdown." The debut novel of Mona Arshi, whose Small Hands won the 2015 Forward poetry prize for best first collection, focuses on a British Indian family in suburban London. The child narrator, Ruby, has a sister, Rania. Their father is "an untidily put-together man with a mild temperament". Their mother is prone to "accidents" with the secateurs, and "Mugdays", which bring daily life to a stalemate: "Simple things, like getting out of bed and into some fresh clothes, eating and drinking, have to be gently negotiated, navigated and pleaded for." The garden, and the elderly neighbour who encourages their mother to work on it, prove to be a salvation. "My mother mulched the vegetable patch", we are told, and "withdrew from the earth her first crop of firm, silky-skinned aubergines." But when winter descends, and gardening duties are fewer, the family have to be on standby for Mugduty. Friends are summoned to help; "Auntie Number One", who is a troubling figure because the girls "knew she lived with a man; we caught sight of her putting up posters for the Labour Party with someone who wore a leather jacket". Meanwhile, Ruby stumbles over the word "sister" at school one day, and abruptly stops talking altogether. This isn't a vow of silence so much as a renunciation of speech, an attempt to opt out of a world incapable of engaging with what she has to say beyond overemphasising the ethnicity of the speaker. For Ruby, speech is an inadequate mechanism for self-presentation: "The first thing you start doing when you start talking is editing." A neighbour's backhanded attempts at kindness are accompanied by the phrase "even little brown girls". Ruby's pen pal breaks off their correspondence with the parentally dictated note: "[my dad] found out you're a Paki". As the sisters graduate into puberty, their racialisation and its attendant sexualisation begin to poison their forays into the wider world. The girls go to parties where all the men "have names like Russell or Dominic", where paintings of "lean black men" in "somewhere like Kenya" hang on the walls, where the girls are looked at and the lookers lick their lips. The novel turns on a devastating act closer to home that makes the sisters into a sort of inverted version of Procne and Philomela, where the violated sister is not the silent one. It resists the at times overused feminist admonition to "use your voice": this is a book about silence as a subversive act of care.
Kirkus Review
A lyrical debut novel narrated by a girl who won't speak. That Arshi primarily works as a poet will come as no surprise: Her first novel is made up of short, tight chapters--some less than a page--that are themselves made up of sentences composed with a great deal of intensity. Arshi emphasizes the lyricism of the line and the strength of the image rather than more, say, prosaic matters. Plot, for example, is not at a premium. At the book's center is a family: two sisters, Ruby and Rania, and their parents. Ruby narrates the book's events, such as they are. Her observations are poignant, unique, and frequently witty. At a party, Ruby notes that she feels "a pinch of jealousy"--a friend of hers "looks normal and beautiful, or she's done a really good job of acting that way, which is equally impressive." That Ruby is Arshi's narrator is already a point of tension in the book: Ruby doesn't speak--not to her family, her friends, or to anyone else--but as narrator, she speaks quite clearly to her readers, who quickly get a sense of her unique voice. This gimmick doesn't always work, likely because Arshi doesn't fully explore either Ruby's silence or her reason for maintaining it. Ruby's mother seems to be suffering a psychological breakdown, and her sister, Rania, suffers an act of sexual violence, but these issues, too, go undeveloped. Arshi's approach to fiction is prismatic, and while the result is frequently moving, not one of the strands of her story ends up resolved. In her first novel, Arshi prioritizes the elegance of her sentences over the development of her characters and story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
