PA: Setting Leila in a world not quite ours allowed me to think of our own world in sharp new ways. What made you set Leila in this world that is ours but not quite? The ‘walls’ from the book reminded me of a story titled “The Insert” from Indira Chandrashekhar’s short story collection, Polymorphism which I thought was a brilliant depiction of building walls and breaking them down.

But for the sake of this question let us think of Leila as speculative fiction. MD: In a couple of places online, I noted that you don’t like classification of your work into categories such as speculative fiction, etc. Finding her daughter was her obsession beyond all else, so it made sense that she would discuss this first in her narrative. More than “hooking” the reader, I had to be true to Shalini, my narrator. Take Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous, also by Joseph, in which many key revelations only appear in the latter part of the text. Even the same writers don’t usually repeat the same technique in different novels. Prayaag Akbar: There are different approaches to how you want to transmit information to your reader, and there is certainly no right or wrong way. Do you think a story needs to have a hook among other things like good language, memorable characters, realistic dialogues, etc.?

Manu Joseph’s Illicit Happiness of Other People has a hook too, in which the reader knows Unni has taken his life and his father looks for closure. Michelle D’costa: In Leila, from the first page, the reader is aware that Leila is missing and that her mother is haunted by this all the time. In this interview we discuss his book primarily. On April 20, 2018, Leila completed a year. It will be published in the UK and much of the English-speaking world in July 2018.

Prayaag Akbar is the author of Leila, an award-winning novel that Netflix is now developing into a series.

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