Portrait of a writer as a self-sabotaging wreck

Alina Gufran's debut novel is marred by a clichéd theme and a protagonist who is hard to sympathise with

- Somak Ghoshal

The title of Alina Gufran's debut novel, No Place to Call My Own, is a dead giveaway. In case you guessed it to be a story of alienation, identity crisis, and the search for an elusive "home" by a young and confused protagonist, you'd be spot on. To give credit to the writer, it does take chutzpah to venture into such a long-festering cliché of a theme, especially in a first book. A recent successful experiment with a similar subject was Devika Rege's imperfect but edgy debut novel, Quarter-life (2023), portraying the angst of a generation of Indians who came of age in a nation bristling with communal tension and unbridled capitalism.

The 260-odd pages of Gufran's novel that chronicle the misadventures of her protagonist Sophia, born to "an Arya Samaji Hindu mother and a Sunni Muslim father", unfortunately lacks both the craft and the imagination to pull off this feat. The novel's unoriginality is worsened by the fact that Sophia is a deeply unlikeable character, epitomising the worst dysfunctions that mark young people of a certain vintage, most of whom are oblivious to the advantages they enjoy.