Nikita Lalwani explores genius, education, immigration and parent-child relationships in her debut novel Genius, which was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Literature in 2008. Rumi Vasi, the daughter of parents who immigrated to England from India, lives a life of double alienation because of her ethnicity and her genius. However, it is the pressure exerted by her family rather than the cultural environment that pushes her into this loneliness.

While her mother does not want her daughter to be corrupted by Western morality, her father argues that Rumi must study under strict conditions - in the cold and isolated from everyone else - in order to develop her genius. At fifteen, Rumi, who has been selected to study mathematics at Oxford, begins to question the path that has been set for her and that she must follow, and she makes it her goal to escape this life, whatever the cost.

Masterful, funny, heartbreaking... Lalwani's debut novel is brimming with insights on education and immigration, but even more so on parents and children. The finale at Oxford rivals that of Thomas Hardy's An Anonymous Jude.

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Nikita Lalwani does a good job of getting inside Rumi's head, as we travel from Rumi's innocent childhood years, when he was fascinated by numbers, to his frustrated teenage years, when he tried to grow up in a family that chewed cumin seeds and didn't want him to grow up.

Doug Johnstone, The Times