With love, from Trinidad

The Naipauls are hard to ignore, especially if you're a young Trinidadian of Indian origin, the reading kind and have vague notions of writing a novel some day. Aliyyah Eniath, who's made her debut with The Yard was about 14 years old when she read A House for Mr Biswas, and felt she could be a novelist.

"Earlier, I'd thought writers from this tiny country, what do we have to say? (And then) I saw the magnitude of his narrative and realised how applicable it was to everywhere, not just Trinidad. And I thought to myself that I could do something like this myself later on," says the Trinidadian, who's accompanied by her husband on her first trip to India, and hoping to combine the book's release with a visit to Kashmir.

It's something like the effect, one can imagine, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things had on many of those writing today, the realisation that gold could be mined from the dross of daily life.

In Eniath's case, the power of Naipaul's influence would have been felt more keenly because of their similar histories — both their forefathers had migrated from India, from around the same region in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and had made good in the land they'd been transported to in the late 19th century as bonded labour.

There's one important difference though — while the Naipauls are Hindu, the Eniaths are Muslim. In both novels, religion itself is near incidental; what's important is the belief systems, the values and moral framework that come with being Hindu or Muslim and which have the power to disrupt their characters' emotional lives.

In fact, having seen first-hand the radicalisation of friends and cousins she grew up with, one of the things that Eniath was trying to work through the novel was "what it is in the (Muslim) faith, the way it is preached now, that encourages these radical ideologies", says Eniath.

Naturally then, Eniath's tale shares the same basic geography as Naipaul's classic novel — both are set in rural Trinidad, in the midst of a family home, large and sprawling, where several generations live in close proximity, more often at war, and are suspicious of each other.

But that's where the similarity ends. Eniath's novel is a romance, a simple love story (at least compared to the complicated marriage of the Biswases) between Maya, the younger daughter of Father Khalid, the most prosperous inhabitant of The Yard, a large estate with six comfortable houses occupied by the children of a Indian migrant called Latif Ali, and a poor orphan called Behrooz, who's taken in by them. Inevitably for a debut author, much of this background is autobiographical — Eniath's grandfather, for instance, came to Trinidad from Ghazipur like Latif, and made his fortune upholstering cars, and she remembers her grandparents' home as being very similar to The Yard. Eniath, 35, herself grew up in Port of Spain where her family runs a publishing business. Eniath, too, is in the publishing business, and brings out a magazine called Belle on fashion and lifestyle in the Caribbean.

In her book, Behrooz and Maya form a relationship; there's physical intimacy and afraid of repercussions, she flees to London to learn and teach art. Behrooz remains in Trinidad, and marries. But when Behrooz's wife leaves him and Maya's mother dies, she comes back, and there's happily ever after. "I don't have much patience with sad endings," laughs Eniath.