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Like its two acclaimed predecessors, Sahota’s new novel, China Room, shines a light on contemporary British Asian life – and poverty in 20th-century India. But, says the Derby-born author, class, not race, is his overriding concern
Since the publication of his debut novel, Ours Are the Streets, in 2011, Sunjeev Sahota’s literary output has worked emphatically within the geopolitical fabric of our time, reaching into the darker recesses of the British Asian experience and humanising those most vilified in the rightwing press – the homegrown terrorist (in Ours Are the Streets) and the undocumented migrants (in his Booker prize-shortlisted follow-up, The Year of the Runaways, in 2015).
His third novel, China Room (published next month), continues in this vein. It’s a multigenerational love story set simultaneously against a backdrop of rural poverty in northern India in 1929 and of social deprivation in northern England in 1999. This sophisticated canvas resonates with news stories about farmers’ protests in Punjab and racial segregation in British towns, and speaks in diverse tongues of the subaltern – the illiterate teenage bride, the adolescent junkie – producing what Sahota describes as “a conversation [that runs through the novel] about intergenerational trauma and how it does continue to move forward”. Continue reading...