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Author Book Choices

The Boy with the Topknot

We asked our Featured Author, Sathnam Sanghera, author of The Boy with the Topknot, to recommend three books to our readers.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This book on the secret of happiness by a professor and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago ,was originally published in 1990, which I realise may make this sound like the literary equivalent of saying: “Hey, guys, I’ve just discovered this great new band called Nirvana.” But, in my defence, while Flow was a bestseller in the US, it is much less well known in the UK and I only found time to read it last Christmas. Elegantly written, Csikszentmihalyi merges research from the fields as diverse as consciousness, personal psychology and sociology in an original way and backs up his arguments with experiments he has conducted himself. It's the only self-help book I've ever really enjoyed and, like the very best books, it has altered the way I see the world.

Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe

I love my mum. But I realise that saying so, or even acknowledging the importance of the mother-son relationship, is uncool. Hooray then for Whatever Makes You Happy, in which Sutcliffe recounts the stories of three men in their early thirties who are paid surprise visits by their mothers. Sutcliffe has written many funny and excellent books about the male condition - New Boy, Are You Experienced, and Love Hexagon - but this is by far his most sophisticated, complex and satisfying. I strongly recommend reading it before the inevitable film is released.

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

David Baddiel, who was a 2002 Booker judge, recently confessed in a column in The Times that he struggled with Indian literature, on the grounds that "Indian novels are likely to be magical, mythic, sweepingly historical, quirky of humour, and spring from the tradition of folk tale; all things I don't want in a novel". This hugely enjoyable novel about an Indian maths prodigy growing in 1980s Cardiff is none of these things and I would defy Baddiel not to enjoy it. But given the book was longlisted for the Booker in 2007 and Baddiel remarked in the same piece that "generally, in my book-choosing life, I avoid the Booker shortlist like the plague (except in 2002); year after year (except in 2002), it's a compilation of the worthy and the worthier", I suspect he wouldn't take up the offer.