Lost for Words

This fourth novel by Kathleen Fidler Award winner, Elizabeth Lutzeier, has taken three years to find its way into paperback. In this well researched and closely observed tale, she brings 13-year-old Aysha from rural Bangladesh to a bewildering and inhospitable East London. Perhaps too many issues are touched on - from racial violence to the malevolent teacher who may be a child molester. But Lutzeier is as convincing writing about family life on the Indian sub continent as she is describing the everyday indignities of a National Health hospital ward. Despite the strength of Lutzeier's feelings about the fate of families like Aysha's, she gives as much weight to character and relationships as she does to environment. Aysha is a clever, feisty and sensitive child, who suffers the anxieties and embarrassments of any teenager; and the novel shirks none of the complexities of her reactions to being caught between two worlds. Although Lutzeier writes from the point of view of a sympathetic outsider, she succeeds in her implicit aim of explaining Aysha's experience to young British contemporaries, who may have only the faintest idea of what it means to be 'Lost for Words'.