China Room: The heartstopping and beautiful novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

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This is a novel about discrimination, difficult choices, isolation, and the deep frustration and sense of injustice when one feels in a life without self-determination.

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. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk.

There's a photograph on the final page of Sunjeev Sahota's new novel "China Room," which we'll ask the author about. There was one woman who seemed to stand her own ground and be independent, but even then the narrator was thinking lustful comments about her. China Room tracks two parallel narratives - one set in 1929, following Punjabi child bride Mehar, and the other set in 1999, which follows her great-grandson. As Sahota was born in 1981, it makes sense that he might have graduated school in 1999, the year the second narrative thread is set.

Wilson surveyed the Ground Floor with Hoover, designating a large room toward the southeast, next to the oval Diplomatic Reception Room, as the new "Presidential Collections Room. 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. However, these are mere observations and not value judgements, and the author does succeed in producing a tale that reaches varying degrees of compelling for various readers. The whole concept of the girls not knowing their husbands leading to trouble (which kind of trouble you can very well imagine upfront) feels very YA to me, maybe fitting for a 15 year old main character, but still I can hardly believe when living in such a tight circle of 7 persons that one would make the mistake Mehar makes. This is the third novel by the author, who like me has a mathematics degree and like me started his career, post-graduation, working for a life insurance company (our paths rather diverged after that).Sadly, I doubt it stands much chance of winning the Booker this year, but from what I've read so far, am crossing fingers it makes the shortlist. They live in the china room, which sits at a slight remove from the house and is named for the old willow-pattern plates that lean on a high stone shelf, a set of six that arrived with Mai years ago as part of her wedding dowry. This is unlike Sahota’s last Man Booker nominated novel ( The Year of the Runaways, which I loved), and although it feels less deep, it worked for me. But rather than feeling confined by whatever real-life elements informed its creation, it exists in a far more indeterminate, diffuse dimension, at times taking on an almost fairytale quality. The follow-up to his Booker Prize-shortlisted The Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota's new novel follows characters across generations and continents (from Punjab to rural England) and is equally heart-wrenching.