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What was he thinking? Did he think he had made the right decision in coming here ? To this town? To England ? Did he wonder, like I did, like I still do whenever I see my daughter be so casually, so unthinkingly, sidelined in the playground, did he too wonder if these people would ever agree to share ownership of this land ? Did he worry that our lives here would always be seen as fundamentally illegitimate ? cares how things are done. Rey sketches “a modest mind”– a CRTT system that has perception, can make deductive and 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. The 1929 section is quietly powerful but the modern day section for me did not work as well as it could have done. Some of the sections set in the narrator’s childhood were very powerful – for example a remembered ill-fated visit to a birthday party, glimpses of the struggles in the lives of his parents – but I felt these could have been longer. And I felt that the narrator’s initial struggles with addiction were rather disregarded over time and replaced with more of a relationship story. Now that strand – but much more firmly rooted in time, place and harsh reality, forms one of the two point of view tales which are interleaved in the novel – and perhaps draws more on a Shakespearean tradition of mistaken identity than magic realism.
The author was discussing his ideas for a third novel in interviews around 2015 but in time the form of the novel changed – originally it had been intended as a magic realism novel roaming across time and with a rather broad sense of place, but it has ended as a much quieter novel, while still drawing on the same genesis - a family legend about his great-grandmother, who with three other women was married to four brothers – but “None of them knew which man she was married to ….because they had to remain veiled the whole time. There was no electricity. It was in the middle of nowhere on a rural farmstead and they didn’t know who was the husband, so the story goes.”
Returning to the modern day timeline, I remember not much from the events that drove this narrator to the farm of his great grandmother to be fair. The modern day story line has a boy coming clean of heroin.
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. After Midnight's Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day. In an interview in January 2011, he stated: Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher. I enjoyed the book, but I wish aspects had been more developed. Having just heard the author speak with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company, I appreciated the book a great deal more than I had right upon completion of it. I would be delighted to see it make the Booker shortlist. SAHOTA: Yeah, sure, so it's a photo of my great-grandmother holding me when I was a very newborn. And the photo was always there in my mind, and in my mind, it was always at the end of the book has a way of knotting these two stories together - the story of a great-grandmother, a story of Mehar, as you outlined, which is loosely based on a family legend of mine or my family's, some piece of lore about a great-grandmother who didn't know which of four brothers actually, in fact, was her husband. Garrett, Wendell D (1995). Our Changing White House. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-222-5. More in-depth thoughts to follow on https://thereadersroom.org/ where I am serving as a member of a panel (to analyze the Booker Prize).
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.
On the inside of the cover, it reads “Inspired in part by the author’s family history” This always adds an extra element to the narrative and has the reader pondering how much is fact and how much is fiction. 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 Dual timeline story set in rural Punjab. The modern story involves a young man’s struggle with heroin addiction. He travels from England to India to live on his uncle’s farm while he goes through withdrawal. While there, he develops a fondness for a female doctor and learns more about a family secret involving his great grandmother. Many years later, he writes this story. I liked how Sahota linked his motifs between the two storylines, and I also found the narrative suspenseful and interesting. Sure, many questions remain unresolved, and the novel could have been longer and could have given more details - in the end, I would have enjoyed to stay longer with the characters, because I wanted to know more about the years and people left out. The atmospheric writing is highly effective and touching.
Retailers:
SIMON: And I know it's at the end of the book, but do you mind if we begin by asking about that photo?
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