ORIGINS OF LOVE, by Kishwar Desai. Simon & Schuster, 2013, 496 pp., £7.99 (paperback)
Kishwar Desai calls her novels social thrillers; books set in the beating heart of modern-day India that lay bare its caldron of inequalities, injustices and cultural traditions. The first, 2010's "Witness the Night," won the Costa first novel award — and deservedly so; it somehow managed to deal with female infanticide in India without ever resorting to heavy-handed polemic.
That it worked so well was in no small part thanks to Desai's engaging social worker-cum-detective protagonist Simran Singh. So it makes sense that she returns for the followup, "Origins of Love" — but this time she finds herself entangled in India's shockingly prevalent surrogacy industry.