 Joseph was awarded the Betty Trask Prize in 2011.Also that year, the novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize; one of the judges, Edward Stourton, praised Joseph's "extraordinary maturity" and added that it was "hard to believe that it is a first novel".The novel also won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction, sharing the trophy with Omair Ahmed's "Jimmy The Terrorist", and was nominated for The Hindu Literary Prize.