Tell Me How to Be follows an Indian American family, meeting together in their house a year after the father's death. His widow, Renu, has decided to move back to London and needs help packing up the house. Bijal is the older son - a successful doctor, married to a white woman and living in a beautiful house. Akash, the younger one, is an R&B songwriter, hiding his sexual orientation from his family and struggling with alcohol addiction issues. When the three of them meet, the unsolved tensions and unspoken secrets quickly bubble up to the surface and force the family to face their past while desperately trying to navigate the fragile bonds binding them together.

I am completely in awe of this book. It's a slow-paced novel, told from Akash's and Renu's POVs, that in a very tender and bitter-sweet way examines what it means to be a family and how to reconcile that with being an individual. It explores what prompts people to make their own choices and to take responsibility for their actions, and how sometimes fear prevents them from being their best selves. The way Patel constructed the relationship between Akash and Renu was especially gorgeous, and I loved how layered and complex their bond was. There are a lot of flashbacks in the novel and it was incredibly satisfying to watch all the pieces of the puzzle come together and explain the characters' choices and motivations. While a significant chunk of the novel deals with loss, pain, and regret, there's also a lot of joy, happiness, and - most importantly - love. Patel approaches these themes in a very gentle, understanding way that helps see the events he writes about from different perspectives.

Overall, Tell Me How to Be is a beautiful, moving story focused on family and finding your own place in the world and it left me with a warm, hopeful feeling in my heart. It is simply a gem of a book!