Only connect The first novel from the author of We Move ambitiously spans continents and time

Gurnaik Johal's first book, 2022's We Move, demonstrated how rewarding it can be for a gifted young writer to ignore conventional wisdom.

- Keshava Guha

Writers who land in agents' inboxes with collections of stories are invariably told to come back when they have a novel, and to write about what they know. Johal's stories were set in a world he knows intimately the immigrant communities of west London - but they moved between professions and generations with thrilling confidence.

Saraswati is also populated by a large cast of diaspora Punjabis. But where Johal's collection stood apart from the landscape it was published into, his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name, but its features are all too recognisable.

These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are palaeontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians.

The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts.

The reader puts these novels together, like jigsaw puzzles. One could call them "connection novels"; not in the Forsterian sense of human hearts, but rather the ecological, cultural and financial structures that link the globe.