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

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It seems I might have been expecting a lush, evocative Indian historical drama with deeply drawn characters set amongst political turmoil. 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. I didn’t fully understand the reasoning behind each character’s actions and I didn’t understand the historical events that were briefly mentioned in the book.

It's so touching how details he encounters such a flecks of paint on a wall or a crumbling disused structure have such a potent meaning when we also see them in this earlier story. The two other brothers are also married in the same ceremony to two other young women, and due to this - and the fact that the wives lead separate lives from their husbands and their encounters are only in darkened rooms - she does not know which brother she is married to. His second novel, The Year of the Runaways, about the experience of illegal immigrants in Britain, was published in June 2015. The end of the room widens enough for a pair of charpoys to be laid perpendicular to each other and across these two string beds all three women are made to sleep.Mehar's unnamed great-grandson has been shipped off to his uncle's house in India from the UK one summer to undergo heroin withdrawal before starting university in the fall. Because when you’re in love it is everything, it is imprisoning, it is all there is, and you’d do anything, anything, to keep that love. I don't know if the young man battling the heroin problem is him, but it's a convincing account of a self-destructive struggle. Whether you’re looking for your next steamy romance, an excuse to cry ugly tears or want to be whisked away to a new magical realm, we have something for you.

Sahota had not read a novel until he was 18 years old, when he read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children while visiting relatives in India before starting university. There were moments in both novels when I resented being drawn out of the urgency of the stories from the past. And Mehar, we should explain, was actually, I believe, promised in marriage, if that's the term, I mean, or bound in marriage at the age of 5, right?

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.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an advanced reader’s copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Living in Mehar’s former house and building a crush on an older female doctor who visits him there, he tries to separate facts from legends. The narrative’s most important driver is that, while each of the brothers knows which wife is “theirs”, the veiled young women do not. In the 1999 the young man has come to stay with his uncle, but ends up living at the farm and falling in love for the first time.It's the year 1929 in rural Punjab, and 15-year-old Mehar wonders which of the three brothers of the house is her husband, as all three girls have been married the same day and are kept unaware of who is whose husband - sexual meetings always occur in a windowless room, in almost complete darkness. 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. I never read Sahota’s Booker listed “The Year of the Runaways” but I’d still be willing to give it a shot. Although one can easily detect the author's attempts at deftly trying to intertwine the two narratives in an understated fashion, the final product feels somewhat incomplete. Cleaning up the property as a project to occupy his days, he discovers the room where she lived, and hears rumors about her legendary life, full of brutality, scandal, and betrayal.