Bread and Bread

Lovely cover, lovely book. Sandra Hunter ’s Losing Touch is a quiet book that unfolds as life does—in lonely moments and poignant ones; matters of life and death are written in cups of tea, mechanical beds and long distance phone calls. Nevertheless, Hunter’s first novel began as something of a thriller for me, because something is wrong with protagonist Arjun Kulkani’s leg, and he has good reason to believe it could be a type of motor neuron disease, his family’s genetic curse (British doctors initially dismiss the immigrant’s self-diagnosis, because they believe a disease that’s common in India must be the result of some third-world problem that could not manifest in England). As a hypochondriac whose fears have, on occasion, proven right, I was filled with dread on Arjun’s behalf. Each chapter is named for a symptom: “Reduced Deep Tendon Reflexes” or “Weakness of the Facial and Tongue Muscles.” Like any slow, degenerative illness, the cruelty of Arjun’s disease is that, in...