Choice by Neel Mukherjee review – twisty tales of morals

A publisher and his authors debate the balance of power between reader and writer in a novel comprising three long, loosely linked tales

Early in the UK-based Indian writer Neel Mukherjee’s new novel, Ayush, an editor at a “self-styled literary imprint” in London, is exchanging emails with one of his authors, MN Opie, while working on the latter’s short story collection. Opie wonders if the common reader really cares about the order of the stories in the manuscript: “Can one leave the different strands that constitute a story or a novel seemingly unknit and hope – trust– readers to bring them together into meaning?” Ayush would rather the subtext was clearly spelt out. “Why not knit them for the reader?” He types, but then deletes the question.

The two questions are at the heart of Choice, which consists of three long, loosely linked tales, a book that Ayush might have pitched to his colleagues as “a novel-in-stories”. Ayush lives with his partner, Luke, an economist, and their two “white-ish” children in a lavish Victorian terrace on the perimeter of Dulwich and Herne Hill. Luke grew up in one of those loaded families with a trust fund and a villa in Gloucestershire; about Ayush, we’re only told he spent his early years in Kolkata (like Mukherjee), and that for his generation, the idea of gay parenting was “literally, unthinkable”. Now their kids go to a school in Brixton Hill and on weekends they go hiking with their dog, Spencer. Their daily schedules could have been grist for bourgeois bonhomie on TikTok, except that Ayush insists, and feels, that he is “at war with his own world”. He shows the children a documentary about pigs being slain in cages to wean them off meat. When Luke isn’t around, he installs cutoffs for the water supply to their three-storey house, with timers for all the lights. If that isn’t enough, he slices up his debit and credit cards and donates thousands of pounds stashed away for the children to organisations combating the climate crisis. Ayush isn’t the first fictional character to obsess about irreversible environmental damage; where Mukherjee succeeds is in rendering his agony, his insomnia, as absorbingly believable.

Choice by Neel Mukherjee is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply