The Year of the Runaways

Starred review from January 25, 2016
Lyrical and incisive, Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel is a considerable achievement: a restrained, lucid, and heartbreaking exploration of the lives of three young Indian men, and one British-Indian woman, as their paths converge in Sheffield, England, over the course of one perilous year. In India, Avtar Nijjar, unfairly fired from his job as a bus conductor, is engaging in a secret relationship with Lakhpreet Sanghera, the teenage daughter of a neighboring family. When Lakhpreet’s 19-year-old brother, Randeep, is forced to abandon his education, and their government-employee father suffers a mental breakdown, Randeep is sent to England to make enough money to keep the family afloat. Lakhpreet arranges for Avtar to accompany him, although Avtar must sell a kidney and accept a predatory loan to afford a student visa, while Randeep travels on a marriage visa. His bride is the London-born Sikh Narinder Kaur, whose desire to help the desperate Randeep runs counter to her family’s pious religiosity and her impending arranged marriage. Rounding out the cast is the 19-year-old Dalit Tochi Kumar, arriving in England illegally after his entire family is massacred by radical Hindu nationalists. Quarrelling, parting, and finding solace in one another in unexpected ways, Sahota’s characters are wonderfully drawn, and imbued with depth and feeling. Their struggles to survive will remain vividly imprinted on the reader’s mind.

January 15, 2016
The intertwined lives of four Indian immigrants in England reveal broad truths through heartbreaking details. It seems like a common enough premise at first: several young people from struggling families flee their native country to find a better life--or better work, at least. But as Sahota (Ours Are the Streets, 2011) demonstrates in his rough-around-the-edges second novel, every immigrant story is wholly individual, no matter how familiar it feels. Weaving back and forth through chronologies and perspectives, he traces the origin stories of Randeep, Avtar, and Tochi as they make their ways from India to Sheffield, an industrial city in the north of England, in the early 2000s. Lonely Randeep must support his "visa wife," a religious Sikh and fellow immigrant named Narinder, who sought the role out of a sense of service, leaving an arranged engagement, a violent brother, and a disappointed father behind. When Randeep's sense of obligation toward her turns to affection, Narinder folds further inward until she meets fiery Tochi, who belongs to the destitute Dalit ("untouchable") caste. He squats in the apartment below hers, and they gradually connect through their shared alienation from the parts they're supposed to be playing--but it's an impossible pairing, of course. Piety and fury don't get happy endings. Neither does delicate Avtar, who winds up working a series of filthy, treacherous jobs despite his student visa. England is rarely kind to this quartet, thwarting their efforts at betterment with police raids, poverty, and other trials. Sahota peppers these scenes with a riot of minor characters that can be overwhelming, but his observations of our broken social system are razor-sharp.

Starred review from January 1, 2016

This intense and dramatically realistic novel, which was short listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, delves into the illegal immigrant situation in contemporary England. The story opens with Randeep marrying Narinder, an English citizen and deeply religious Sikh who has decided to postpone her own wedding and risk ruining her family's reputation not out of love but to provide Randeep with a legal means to move to England. Avtar, who is involved with Randeep's younger sister, travels to England on a student visa but is interested only in finding work and sending money back home. Tochi, an untouchable whose entire family was murdered, is also searching for work. A man of few words and fierce determination, he moves into the house where Randeep and Avtar are living with other illegal immigrants, as they take the lowest-level construction jobs and other menial tasks. After their house is raided, they are left to scavenge for work and shelter, lost in a strange land where they don't speak the language and have no understanding of the basic rules of society. VERDICT Proclaimed one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013, Sahota depicts the culture, language, and mentality of Britain's Indian immigrant community from deep within. A harrowing and moving drama of life on the edge. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016
Half a dozen young men have left their homes in India to occupy a run-down flat in England, living and working under the radar. Avtar, who arrived via the auspices of a student visa, cannot afford to lose his documentation. Tochi, a member of the untouchable caste, fled a village massacre but traces of discrimination haunt his new life. Randeep struggles to grow more comfortable with his wife, their marriage arranged to secure visas. For each thread of this multilayered tale, Sahota enlivens the characters' plights with page-turning prose and poetic texture, whether the untranslated dialect tossed about in conversation, the fixings of home-roasted roti and mango pickle, or the exquisite details of butterflies or a woman's glinting, gold wedding nose ring. The novel's nearly 500 pages fly by, a testament to the interwoven narratives of Sahota's many characters, structured around the seasons of the year. Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and similar in style and subject to works by Hanif Kureishi, Ru Freeman, and Laila Lalami, this is Sahota's first book to be published stateside.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)