Evening is the Whole Day Preeta Samarasan Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99

More tales of the diaspora

The name of Preeta Samarasan was seen everywhere in Malaysia this summer, from airport bookshops to generous spreads in Sunday newspapers. Ubiquitous were comparisons to Salman Rushdie, and lavish the praise ("a thrilling new talent" - Peter Ho Davies). Back in Britain, however, despite being published by the respected Fourth Estate, this first-time novelist seems barely to have registered with the literary editors, let alone troubled the bestseller lists.

Has our enthusiasm for authors from the Indian diaspora been sated? (The latest Booker Prize would suggest not.) Is the novel simply not that good? Or is it that the two generations separating us from the 1950s have been sufficient for national memory to fade so completely that we no longer recognise our former Far East colonial possessions and their history. Indians in Britain we know of and happily read about, Indians in India too. Malaysia? What are Indians doing there, and what's it got to do with us?

Rather a lot, is the answer. And that's one reason why Samarasan's story is not just about the Rajasekharan family, the ghosts haunting their "big house" in the old Malayan tin-mining heartland of Ipoh, or the mysterious circumstances surrounding the dismissal of the servant girl Chellam and the sudden departure of charming, spineless "Uncle Ballroom" (named after his career as a professional dancer).

Evening is the Whole Day has been called a Midnight's Children for Malaysia because it, too, traces the story of a new nation from independence, through the political upheavals of deciding who and what it was, to the present. The dash of curdling lime that regularly surfaces in this warm, spice-laden tale, however, is that unlike in India, where it has been generally accepted that all the inhabitants of the subcontinent have rights of abode and citizenship, the Malaysian Indian community has never been sure of its place.

Transported by the British to work as "coolies" on the rubber plantations, the (mostly Tamil) Indians faced uncertainty when the white man departed. They believed the country was their home, but their new masters, the majority Malays who dominated government at every level, disagreed. Citizenship was granted slowly and grudgingly. Politically, they were sidelined, as Raju, the Oxford-educated lawyer and paterfamilias of Samarasan's big house, finds when his hopes of office are dashed after the race riots of 1969. "You should have stayed far, far away from the bloody boat that brought you here," says Raju to his dead grandfather as he reflects bitterly on the policy of entrenching Malay privileges at the expense of other races that was introduced after the disruptions that year. "In India I would've had a real chance."

This history is far from being forgotten. Last December tens of thousands of Malaysian Indians took part in marches in Kuala Lumpur organised by the Hindu Rights Action Force, demanding the British government give them citizenship - or $4trn in compensation for having brought their ancestors to Malaya.

But if this novel is about a community's displacement and disillusionment, it is also about how its culture has mingled with that of the others who call themselves Malaysians; and who are contributing to endowing that term with greater meaning, even if it is yet far from transcending the more powerful signifier of race. Disappointed with life, disappointed by his wife, likeable, self-indulgent Raju takes up with a Chinese woman who sells noodles at a roadside stall. Samarasan doesn't explicitly make the point, but the children Raju has with his mistress - "Chindians" - will, with an irony they will learn to appreciate, have the appearance of Malays but not the privileges of that ethnicity.

The novel has no happy ending, comes to no firm conclusions. It simmers languidly, just as a Malaysian rendang curry cannot be rushed but must be allowed to bubble for hours on end. While it cooks, the smells will permeate the surroundings, as they do through the pages of Evening is the Whole Day. Spirits may appear to talk to children and a dead grandmother may sit in her old chair on the verandah, not aware that she is meant to have departed. Nothing stirs in the humidity and heat of a long afternoon. Just the curry, still simmering.

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