Against my instincts I have joined a consensus, and the consensus is quite wrong about which of these two girls the novel actually belongs to.

People describe this as a novel about female friendship, and I'd like to file a small objection. It's about a neighbourhood, and about the mathematics of who gets to leave one, and the friendship is the instrument the neighbourhood gets measured with.

Everything runs on money and violence and who owes what to whom. The shoemaker, the grocer, the Solara brothers and the sedan everybody recognises and nobody names — Lila's father throwing her out of a window over the question of school isn't a scene about a father's temper. It's a scene about what a family has calculated it can afford.

Here's my real disagreement with everyone I've discussed it with. They say the story belongs to Lila, who is the brilliant one, the dangerous one, the engine. I say it belongs to Lenu entirely, that Lila functions as a device for measuring her, and that you can hear the narration admitting it, quietly, if you watch what gets described and what gets left out. We only ever see Lila's genius through the eyes of somebody who needs her to be a genius.

That index of characters at the front is an admission that the structure has a problem. I also used it about forty times, so I'm in no position to complain.

Nine. The wedding that closes the book is the finest last chapter I've read in years, and I had taken against this book on principle before I opened it.