Someone You Love Is Gone: A Novel

By Gurjinder Basran

"A beautiful, haunting story of one family, spanning generations and continents, as they face life's inevitable losses, struggle with grief and reach for redemption."

—Shilpi Somaya Gowda, New York Times bestselling author of Secret Daughter and The Golden Son

Perfect for readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Anne Tyler, Someone You Love Is Gone is a beautifully rendered, multi-generational story of secrets and ghosts that haunt a family.

I sit at the table and forget myself for a moment and the past steps forward. The house is as it was before Father died, and even before that, before Diwa left and before Jyoti was born. The house had a different light then or perhaps that’s just memory casting a glow on everything, candlelight and sunset, everything only slightly visible. Mother is in the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes. Steam is rising and the window in front of her fogs over her reflection. Even here, she is a ghost.

Simran’s mother has died but is not gone. Haunted by her mother’s spirit and memories of the past, she struggles to make sense of her world. Faced with disillusion in her marriage, growing distance from her daughter and sister, and the return of her long-estranged brother, she is troubled by questions to which she has no answers. As the life Simran has carefully constructed unravels, she must confront the truth of why her brother was separated from the family at a young age, and in doing so she uncovers an ancestral inheritance that changes everything. She allows her grief to transform her life, but in ways that ultimately give her the deep sense of self she has been craving, discovering along the way family secrets that cross continents, generations, and even lifetimes.

Gurjinder Basran’s mesmerizingly beautiful novel, Someone You Love Is Gone, is a powerful exploration of loss and love, memory and history, family ties and family secrets, and the thin veil between this life and the next.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9780062674623

Gurjinder Basran

Gurjinder Basran’s debut novel, Everything Was Good-bye, won the Search for the Great BC Novel Contest and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award (BC Book Prize), and was selected as a Chatelaine book club pick. Basran studied creative writing at Simon Fraser University. She was born in England and moved to Canada with her family when she was a child. She lives in Delta, British Columbia, with her family.

Reviews for Someone You Love Is Gone

[dgmlrhodes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Someone You Love is Gone is a book about grief and family. While not a fast paced book, it is beautifully written and alternates between the story of a mother and a daughter telling each point of view. The book expresses very well the gamut of emotions that you feel when losing a loved one. The author has many passages throughout the story line that address these feelings.I felt that the book also presented an interesting cultural point of view. There are glimpses into the lives of these individuals and their beliefs. If you have lost someone, you will understand this book and the story. If you have not been through a grieving process, it may be difficult to relate. Overall a good read!

[bayleaf_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Someone You Love Is Gone is a book about grief, grieving and letting go. A daughter, Simran, tells her mother's story as she tries to come to terms with her death. It's a quiet book that moves you slowly back and forth between Simran's own life and her mother's. I think it says a lot about what a dearly loved one's death can do to a person and Gurjinder Basran has treated it beautifully in her book. I did find myself left with some unanswered questions at the end and I'm not certain if I missed something in my reading or they were issues raised and never clearly explained, and they all center around Manohor. Questions aside, I would recommend this book.

[erinclark_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a beautiful book. I did have a hard time getting into it at the beginning because the subject matter is so sad, but once I got going I enjoyed it very much. It made me think. It is a story of loss, love, and forgiveness. And also of how fluid relationships can be between family members and lovers. Highly recommended.

[devlindusty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the second book I have read by Gurjinder Basran. Her storytelling is so lyrical and I just love her writing! This book doesn't disappoint. I highly recommend it. I received this book from librarything early reviewers in exchange for an honest review.

[hammockqueen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had trouble staying with this story line..perhaps because of the unfamiliar names. Story had possibilities but not written emotionally enough. Sorry.

[joycemg3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written story about love, death, grieving, loss, and relationships. It also gives you a glimpse into another culture and their beliefs. Simran's mother passes away and finds herself wondering about her life with her husband, her daughter and her siblings. She also has many questions about her family and decides to find the answers.I received this book as a giveaway and am giving my honest opinion of it. I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it.

[gailnyoka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written book where the mother-daughter relationship is central, but where a light is shone on other relationships: that of wife-husband, sister-brother, old lovers.This book is an exploration of memory, a meditation on death and grief, and our attitude toward all those things. "No one says dead" writes Basran. I find it refreshing to see a novel where ideas about death and its lasting effect on a surviving individual are brought into focus. Someone you love is gone. Here we see that the 'someone you love' is not necessarily singular. And what exactly is 'gone?'To go into the plot of this novel would be to spoil the effect of its unfolding heart, which reveals itself one segment at a time, like the opening petals of a flower.

[gingersnap000 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To understand a love one, you must walk in their shoes as Simran, the book's protagonist does following her Mother's death. Simran's parents were forced to marry in India after a tragedy within the family; the aftermath creates misery for them and their three children.The book is told in three parts: Before, Then and Now. The excellent narrative helps the reader feel the pain within all the characters. Simran's pain in losing her mother is extremely difficult to understand until you realize the deep loss her Mother experienced in her youth. Saving face and reputation by a woman's poor choice of love is a common theme in literature but the author in Someone You Love Is Gone illustrates the pain this arrangement can cause.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Everyone grieves differently and it's hard to know when to step in and offer help to someone and when to let them process things in their own way. Losing someone is never simple, never uncomplicated, and when that loss is tied up with so many questions and unexplained issues, it must be that much more difficult. Gurjinder Basran has captured the complex and endless seeming grief of one such situation in her novel Someone You Love Is Gone.The novel opens with Simran getting dressed for her mother's funeral. Amrita's death was not unexpected and Simran is an adult but that doesn't mean that she isn't devastated by the loss of her mother. She finds herself floundering as she grieves the complicated woman who was her mother at the same time she faces the growing estrangement in her marriage and the lengthening distance from her only daughter. The three biggest relationships in her life all become intertwined in this time of sadness and confusion and her difficult relationships with her sister and brother add another layer of stress as they work together to plan the funeral and decide what to do with Amrita's ashes.The novel has three different alternating narrative threads, each building on the others to create a more complete picture of this Canadian-Sikh family's past and present. The present is, of course, the aftermath of Amrita's death and the subsequent squabbling between Simran and younger sister Jyoti as well as the measured disintegration of Simran's marriage as she focuses solely on her grief, uncovering secrets from her mother's past, and her conversations with the ghost of her mother. Mother Amrita's youth and devastating disappointment plays out slowly, unfolding just when explanations are needed for the third plot thread, that of Simran's childhood and the seemingly inexplicable sending away of her younger brother Diwa, an unusual child who knows more about the family's past than he could possibly do.This is at its core, a story about loss. Obviously it is the story of a daughter's loss of her mother, but it is also a story of the loss of hopes and dreams, the loss of a child and sibling. And as the characters journey through their individual griefs, they move towards an acceptance and the flicker of a hope for the future. Simran is brimming over emotionally, alternately frozen and angry, resigned and desperate as she seeks to make sense of her own life and the choices her mother made, choices that forever impacted Jyoti, Diwa, and Simran herself. There is both a turning away from memory and a recognition and welcoming of it as pieces fall into place. The writing is quiet and steady and Simran's grief, her feeling of being set adrift, packs an emotional punch. The details of the expectations and limitations for girls in the India of Amrita's girlhood and then the reality of life in Canada as immigrants are very well drawn. Although there are some big events that happen in the novel, it is more of a character study and a look at one path through the deep sorrow when someone you love is gone. Elegaic in tone, this is a well written tale of one woman's long path towards acceptance and forgiving.

[sidiki-8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is remarkable how she makes ordinary moments so alluring and catches fleeting and subtle expressions so exquisitely. I felt an affinity with Simran on so many fronts specially her relationship with her family members including the death of her mother. Would like to have her teach me writing fiction. The book is not big on plot or even character development still it kept me wanting to read on and on maybe because of her honest portrayal of needs without being sentimental.i marvel at her choice of words. I didn’t find a single boring sentence whereas I get bored many a times in books on the New York Times bestseller lists.