Campaign for the American Reader: Top ten books about family secrets

Jyoti Patel is the author of The Things That We Lost. Her debut novel is told from the perspectives of 18-year-old Nik and his British Indian mother Avani,

flitting between the past and present as Nik searches for answers surrounding the circumstances of his father’s death.

Patel is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA and was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best New Novelists for 2023.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books that nicely capture "the negotiation that takes place between a narrator and reader when [family] secrets are involved, whether the two stand side by side in unearthing them, or the dramatic irony that charges through a story when truths are revealed to one but not the other." One title on the list:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Against the backdrop of the second world war, a 12-year-old girl flees Paris with her father to live with her great-uncle and his housekeeper. She is blind, so to help her navigate her new home, her father builds a miniature of it. Unknown to his daughter, he hides something in the model house. Then he goes missing and her world collides with Werner, a German orphan who is an expert at fixing radios, a highly coveted piece of technology. Rich with detail and intricately woven, it’s a story of resilience told in vivid prose.