The author’s second novel “The Runaways” was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and was also winner of that year’s Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for literary second novels. The narrator takes up an opportunity to combat his addiction by visiting an uncle in Punjab before he starts at a London university; he goes armed only with whisky and a selection of books “all by or about people who had already taken their leave”. His reading list – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, a biography of Leonora Carrington, poetry by Les Murray – is a summary of what troubles and interests him: addiction, family, memory, surrealism, belonging and unbelonging. Later in the novel he realises that he hopes “reading about life might be a way to overcome it”. Sahota refuses to let his historical characters act as though they are in a historical novel Sunjeev Sahota is a British novelist. Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, and his family moved to Chesterfield when he was seven years old. His paternal grandparents had emigrated to Britain from the Punjab in 1966. After finishing school, Sahota studied mathematics at Imperial College London. As of January 2011, he was working in marketing for the insurance company Aviva.

I find it hard to rate this book as it is not my culture that this book is centered on and I read that this book is somewhat based off of the author’s own family history, but I still want to express my opinions on this book the best that I can and this review might turn into a rant... If this book interests you, don’t let my dissatisfaction in the book hinder you from reading it, but do proceed with caution as this book effected me mentally while I read it. Mehar and two other young girls are married off in a single ceremony to three brothers. Their oppressive and controlling new mother-in-law, Mai, keeps them in the dark as to which of the brothers each has actually married. Their only encounters with their new husbands happen in the dark, behind closed doors, as they attempt to bear sons for the family. More in-depth thoughts to follow on https://thereadersroom.org/ where I am serving as a member of a panel (to analyze the Booker Prize). The book is also underpinned by a sense of loss and of having to settle for a substitute or reduced status. SAHOTA: It's very deliberate. Yes, she's very much handed over or taken, in fact. It's not like she has a choice. It's not even considered that she might want to know who she is, in fact, marrying. And the reason why she doesn't know who she's married to, it's left slightly opaque in the book. Is it just a sense of that no one thought to tell her? It's just a bit of negligence. Or is it the fact that her mother-in-law is so controlling and overbearing that it's a deliberate sign of withholding? I think it starts off as being that no one's actually thought that she might want to know who she's marrying into. And it becomes a way for her mother-in-law to actually control the entire house by extension.Abbott, James Archer; Rice, Elaine M (1998). Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration. New York City: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-02532-7.

It was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn't quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could. Set in 1929 rural Punjab, we follow the third-party story of Mehar living in a small standalone building on a farm (known as the “China Room” due to its decoration) with two other women – Harbans and Gurleen. The three were married on the same day to the brothers: the oldest of which is Jeet and the youngest the rather rebellious Suraj. The family Matriach Mai gives the brothers permission to sleep with their wives on different nights – but the veiled women are not allowed to view their husbands. The narrative development in the book occurs when Mehar starts meeting Suraj (who she works out from observation must be her husband) outside of Mai’s supervision.China Room has two stories that are loosely connected. One follows a girl in 1929 who is in an arranged marriage and some events happen that cause her life to go down a path she wasn’t expecting. The other story is about a man who is struggling with ending his drug addiction. Re: the 1990s narrative—I also didn’t buy that parents would send a teenage heroin addict in the immediate throes of opioid withdrawal to another continent to stay with relatives he’d not seen in years, one of whom is extremely angered by the young man’s presence. There as he reflects on his upbringing – and the overt as well as persistent racism that his family faced after Thatcher-era redundancy lead them to give up their life in Derby (surrounded by family and kin) to set up a shop in an otherwise uniformly-white ex-mining town and which acted as a trigger for his addiction. He also starts a tentative involvement with a visiting Doctor and an initially awkward friendship with a local teacher (both around 20 years older than him) and the two start to draw him out of his addiction, while he also reflects on the locally well-known story of his great grandmother and discovers insights into his Aunt’s past. I appreciate how this book allowed me to see into another way of life and another time period. I also enjoyed the writing style as the author has a way with words that are easy to read yet at the same time very well written. However, I had many problems with this book.

SIMON: Let me ask about Mehar without giving away too much. She gets tripped up by a string of pearls, doesn't she?

Retailers:

The second first-party strand is set 70 years later – as Mehar’s great grandson, shortly before taking up an unconditional offer to study Maths. at Imperial, travels to visit his Aunt and Uncle in India, ostensibly for a family visit but really in an attempt to go cold turkey from heroin addiction. His initial technique seems to be largely to use whisky as a substitute, and in the face of his Aunt’s hostility and his Uncle’s embarrassment he is shipped off to a deserted family farm and ends up staying in the same China Room.