An extraordinary debut from a young British writer, plus the best novels of June

Telegraph

07-06-2025

Saraswati ★★★★★
by Gurnaik Johal
According to Hindu scripture, the Saraswati was one of the great rivers of ancient India. In this ambitious debut, named for that river, by the British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal, a young man of similar heritage from Wolverhampton travels to his ancestral village in the Punjab following his grandmother's death. On his last visit, as a child, the well on her farm had been dry for decades. But now Satnam finds water in it. Could, as the villagers claim, this be the return of the Saraswati?
The politicians who get wind of it certainly think so. If Satnam will just sign over the land, they tell him, he could be part of an 'era-defining project' to resurrect the river and 'return our country back to its former greatness'. Satnam, who's unemployed, going through a breakup and looking for a sense of purpose, cannot sign fast enough, and is soon committing acts of thuggery to encourage other landowners to do the same.
We're made to wait to find out what happens to him, as the novel then cuts to the Chagos Islands and the story of a Mauritanian pest exterminator; indeed, each of Saraswati's seven long sections concern a different main character. But we continue to hear about the Saraswati, the Narendra Modi-esque prime minister who's elected on the promise of resurrecting it, and the rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the project's contravention of a water treaty.
Saraswati is a sobering parable: we corrupt what is miraculous. Yet Johal never loses sight of his characters. In one section, a Canadian eco-saboteur keeps watch for her comrades as they sabotage a lumber mill. She has heard that their next target is where her mother works and phones her, casually suggesting she take some time off. But she can't say what for. It's a brilliantly charged scene.
Johal's other characters include an asexual Kenyan academic, a Bollywood stuntman, a 15-year-old Pakistani influencer and a nameless female journalist: all very different, all well realised. Then, there's Sejal, a 16-year-old girl when we first meet her in 1878, 'destined to live the life of her mother, who had lived the life of her mother'. She elopes to the Punjab with a man called Jugaad, but still ends up living the narrow, destitute life she's hoped to escape.
It seems an incongruous tale to be telling, until we realise it's the same tale – that our seven present-day characters are all Sejal's descendants. The connection forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Saraswati storyline. There, like the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wings, a small thing escalates into something terrible; here, the reverse happens – that is, from someone seemingly insignificant comes an amazingly various diaspora. But then almost everything in Saraswati works beautifully. Johal has written a major novel, and at his very first attempt. GC
Saraswati is published by Serpent's Tail at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
So People Know It's Me ★★★★☆
by Francesca Maria Benvenuto
On Nisida, an island off the coast of Naples and site of a notorious juvenile prison, one inmate called Zeno – a 15-year-old who has been detained for shooting and killing another boy – is given a simple task by his Italian teacher, Ms Martina: write down what you're thinking, and you'll get furlough for Christmas.
Zeno duly complies. And so through a run of sprawling entries that make up Francesca Maria Benvenuto's engrossing debut novel, So People Know It's Me, we learn about Zeno's life both before prison and inside it. There's his impoverished upbringing, which forced his mother to resort to sex work; descriptions of friends he's made on the inside, among them a guard called Franco; his girlfriend, Natalina; and the story of his slow capture by a world of criminal drug gangs that has led him to where he is now.
Almost instantly, we see that Benvenuto is presenting us with that most tempting of literary archetypes: the loveable rogue, who despite having committed some of the most awful acts imaginable, still wins our sympathy through charm, and – in the case of a young criminal such as Zeno – the glimpses of innocence he occasionally betrays. We see this, and we prepare ourselves not to be taken in by it. Only here, through the unusual twists and turns of Benvenuto's narrative, the trick of the archetype works on us all the same.
Compelling though this is, So People Know It's Me has an equally strong sales pitch: Benvenuto is an accomplished criminal lawyer who has defended minors in court. Her book draws from the experiences of her mother who – just like Ms Martina – worked as a teacher on Nisida, home to a very real prison for young people.
And yet Benvenuto avoids wielding that authority too heavily. She never bashes over our heads the very legitimate moral problems of housing minors in a prison complex as on Nisida; rather, intimate experience affords her an empathy that feels real without being sentimental. Zeno is under no illusions that what he has done is wrong – but that does not make him less human or beyond hope. With time, his simple writing exercise becomes a project of self-realisation; near the end of the novel, Zeno begins to envision a life for himself beyond prison, perhaps even as a writer.
As befits her setting near Naples, Benvenuto's original prose blends Italian with Neapolitan. Inevitably, the translator Elizabeth Harris has replaced this interplay between two languages with just one: but the more diminished English, with Zeno's voice peppered with vague colloquialisms, feels as though it belongs everywhere and nowhere at once ('she don't got no problems'). And where Harris has let the occasional Neapolitan word or phrase stand on its own – strunz, scornacchiato, 'nnammurata – we're only reminded of a layer of meaning that has been lost. This dualism is important, though: in particular, I'm left wondering where Benvenuto might have originally slipped into Neapolitan to distinguish between other dualities, such as between social classes or children and adults. (That isn't to criticise Harris's work, however. Another translator might have cast the Neapolitan in another mutually intelligible dialect – imagine a back and forth between English and Scots – but the specificities of Italy would still be lost.)
But perhaps this musing is all too hypothetical, and in any case, the unavoidable compromises of translation aren't enough to detract from Benvenuto's strength as a storyteller. Her messaging is similarly deft: everybody is simultaneously the product of structural problems and also not, as Zeno proves. Good people can arise even from difficult circumstances and vice versa. That's a philosophy that survives change and iteration – and is always worth retelling. DMA