A transfixing novel about two unforgettable characters seeking to free themselves--one from the expectations of women in early 20th century Punjab, and the other from the weight of life in the contemporary Indian diaspora SIMON: Yes, well, let's hope (laughter). I think that would be wonderful. Sunjeev Sahota, his novel "China Room" - thank you so much for being with us. that it all depends on what one means by “understand”– points discussed in the section on The Intuition Reply. Others

An unnamed 18-year-old boy in the throes of a heroin addiction spends the summer in his ancestral village as he detoxes and attempts to salvage what is left of his life before heading off to university in the fall. During his stay, he falls in love with an older woman and discovers information about his great-grandmother and the china room. SAHOTA: Yeah, very much so - this idea of dramatic truth, this idea of watching people struggle with going through life. So mine enables me to live my own life in a better and more self-aware way, I think. I still to this day derive a great deal of solace and hope from reading novels. It seems to me like reading novels is a perfectly viable way to spend your life, really (laughter). 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.

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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. Monkman, Betty C; Sidey, Hugh S (2001). The White House: An Historic Guide. Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association. ISBN 0-912308-79-6. Monkman, Betty C (2000). The White House: Its Historic Furnishing & First Families. Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association. ISBN 0-7892-0624-2. One of the novel’s two stories, set in the late ’90s, has a young British man of South-Asian descent visiting his uncle and aunt in the Punjab, apparently to sweat out his heroin addiction. Well aware of his aunt’s displeasure at having him in her home, he asks his uncle if he might stay on the abandoned ancestral farm, which he ends up partially renovating with the help of friends he makes in the village. In the first, set in the 1920s, three young brides marry three brothers who live on a small farm in rural Punjab. Under the strict rules women lived under there, they are not allowed to see their husbands' faces, and the youngest of them, Mehar, is seduced by the youngest brother, who is not her husband.

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The first sentence reads, “Mehar is not so obedient a fifteen-year-old that she won’t try to uncover which of the three brothers is her husband.” SAHOTA: Yeah, that's true. At that young age, there seemed to have been a pact made between her ancestors that a brother from that family would marry a daughter from this family. And so it was almost preordained. In Indian law, still today, there is that sense that when a girl is married into a family, particularly in some of the rural parts of India, especially in Punjab, which is a state I most know, that she's considered almost a - just a waiting visitor in the family she's born until she goes off to her so-called real family, which is the one she's married into. 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. 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." --Entertainment Weekly