The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

M.G. Vassanji is the author of five acclaimed novels: The Gunny Sack, which won a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize; No New Land; The Book of Secrets, which won the very first Giller Prize; Amiriika; and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, which also received the Giller Prize. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.

* One of the most impressive things about this fine novel is that it gives voice to a people some of whose forebears were in Africa before the Portuguese. It must be one of the most faithful accounts ever written about growing up through the cruel days of a guerrilla war in Africa. -- Christopher Hope Daily Telegraph * This is a fine and memorable novel that will remind us that a good family saga, complete with romance and arranged marriages, can also place before us subtle moral issues, as well as portray all the drama and agony of an Empire's dissolution, and the birth and shattering of dreams. -- Alexander McCall Smith The Times * A wholly engaging and spirited novel of Africa: warm, shrewdly charming, replete with its own wry and humane wisdom. -- William Boyd * The true strength of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall lies in its storytelling. What perhaps is also M G Vassanji's triumph is that in choosing Africa and this particular period of history, he demonstrates that racism, prejudice and bigotry do not belong to one group along but are party of the human condition, going hand in hand with fear, suspicion and intolerance. -- Natasha Mann Scotland on Sunday