THE EDGE OF NOWHERE

Sunjeev Sahota channels his immigrant past and the pain of unbelonging into the Booker Prize long-listed China Room

- MANDIRA NAYAR

It is lunch time in Sheffield. Sunjeev Sahota looms large and lanky on the screen. This is his third book, and his second time on the Booker Prize list. His second book, The Year of the Runaways, was shortlisted in 2015. The book revolves around migrants; much before immigration became a divisive issue, before Brexit and Trump.

China Room is deep and dark, a lingering presence. It is fiction, based on family history. The main character—named S—comes to his parents’ village in India in a bid to break a drug habit. The parallels are obvious: like S, Sahota also grew up in a house filled with cousins. His parents “struck out to open a shop”. He did math at Imperial College. It is this swing between reality, memory and a deep sort of sadness that makes this book irresistible.

“I have always said my novels have a personal base,” he says. “They always spring from something that I am aware of in my history. Or something around me in my daily life.” With China Room, it started with a family legend of a great grandmother who was one of four women who did not know who they were married to until a year later.

“I don’t know how that story has been embellished over the years. Lord knows, family stories get more exaggerated,” he says. “It struck me as a painful and dark premise. To have three women in a dark room not knowing who they were married to. I thought that there was something novelistic in that, so I tried to write that story.”