One and a half months ago, 23-year-old math prodigy Sufiah Yusof was exposed by a British tabloid earning a living as a call girl. She entered Oxford as a 13-year-old, dropped out after a year and demanded to be placed with a foster family because of her tyrannical father.

Nikita Lalwani builds her Booker-nominated novel Gifted on the spine of Yusof’s story. Young math prodigy Rumika Vasi is forced to put in Olympian hours by her controlling, academic father, who checks in on her throughout the day to make sure she’s studying instead of reading novels. Mahesh allows her just ten pence at a time to make an emergency call home. Rumi reminds me of the autistic protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Her math intuition is shown with the conceit from A Beautiful Mind: she reflexively calculates hypotenuses and areal densities like a pilgrim worrying her prayer beads.

Like Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi and Ardashir Vakil, Lalwani chronicles an unhappy British Asian family. The first half of the book wallows in Rumi’s monotonous training, and the plot doesn’t move. I felt like poor Rumi locked in a room, stuck with flashbacks of my own multiplication-drill childhood. Rumi acquires the brainiac version of a meth habit, chewing large amounts of jeera to calm her anxiety. Her cumin habit leaves sores on her tongue and exposes her to public ridicule. The first half of this novel feels similarly pointless and painful.

But you must persevere. Once Rumi wins admission to Oxford, the book becomes a coming-of-age story, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s very gendered writing now, chronicling a girl’s sexual awakening, her learning about makeup, clothes, her first kiss. It would’ve been difficult for a male author to write this.

It was painful reliving my own teen culture clash — the showdown over dating, the enforced studying, the first taste of college freedom. Though my parents are hardly like Yusof’s, Lalwani ripped scabs off things I didn’t particularly want to remember, the byproducts of conservative parents meeting a more liberal culture. The second half of Gifted is very personal and culture-specific, like Anita and Me. I’m surprised it translated well enough to earn a Booker nomination.

Lalwani has a light touch, handling the mortification of cross-culture dating far better than, say, Bend It Like Beckham. She makes Rumi’s parents sympathetic and understandable, even though the father is controlling. She tackles the politics of being British Asian without hitting you over the head with them. After Rumi’s father utters pomposities to the press about the virtues of Indian culture, right-wing tabloids trash him and his wife Shreene for thinking themselves better than the British while abusing their daughter.

The prose turns hard, stabby and poetic toward the end:

Glass is coming at her now in rain… Her skin is traced with the feathers of glass. The wet red inside her eye is levered by a piece…. The eye… struggles to expel the hurt. The lid blinks and flutters. Like the tongue of a bird licking and wiring itself round a piece of food, her eyeball rotates wildly…

It’s precise enough to be memorable but withholds much. There’s no happy ending, though in real life, Yusof seems to disagree (NSFW).

A note on covers: both the British and American editions use paisley made of numbers. Neither wears the South Asian uniform of gold and red; the American colors actually suggest chick lit.

Previously: ‘Gifted,’ and talented, Three desis on Booker longlist