Handover

For twenty-one years, Surinder Bansal has been the person who says the worst sentence in the room.She says it in Punjabi, exactly as the doctor said it, because that is the job. You add nothing. You soften nothing. You are a window, not a curtain.Then the trust buys a language service that answers in four seconds, costs eleven pence a minute, and never claims mileage. Surinder is kept on. Not to interpret. To supervise.In a side room on the sixth floor, a surgeon explains a procedure to a man who does not speak English. The machine translates it well. It translates one word slightly wrong, in a way that changes what the man is agreeing to, and nobody else in the room can tell.Surinder can.A quiet, funny, devastating novel about language, care, and what is lost in the four seconds it takes to answer.