Gold Diggers

Gold Diggers is a novel by the American writer Sanjena Sathian, published in 2021. It moves between a suburban childhood and an adult life in the Bay Area, and it uses a piece of old alchemy to talk about the pressure to succeed.

Neil Narayan is a second-generation teenager in the Atlanta suburbs during the Bush years. He is clever and funny and has no share of the drive that surrounds him, and his parents measure him against a sister who is on her way to a university they approve of. Anita, his neighbour, has already worked out that application to schoolwork alone may not be enough.

Anita and her mother have been distilling a potion from stolen gold, using the metal of pieces that belonged to other people to borrow their appetite and their ambition. Anita needs only a little of it to get where she wants to go; Neil needs a great deal more. Their arrangement ends in a catastrophe that divides their community, and the novel picks the story up a decade later, when Neil is a history student in California and Anita is in Silicon Valley with her mother in trouble and one more theft to commit.