Book review: The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
One of our lovely and dearly missed former staff members, Hollie Wilkinson, blogs from her home in Shangahai, China.
The
Year of the Runways by Sunjeev Sahota is one of those books that will
keep you up reading late into the night, a book that has the rare
quality, that after finishing you want to pick it back up and start all
over again.
The
novel is divided into the four seasons, beginning in the cold English
winter in Sheffield. Here we are introduced to the characters this story
is centered on: three Indian men, Tochi, Randeep and Avtar and an
Indian-British woman, Narindar. The first part of the book switches
between the stories of the four characters in Sheffield and chapters of
what their lives were like before their arrival in England.
Sahota
leads the reader through delicately crafted and vivid chapters
contrasting the backdrops of India and England. The first story is
about Tochi, an 'untouchable' who goes from servant to rickshaw driver
in a time of political unrest in India. At the end of winter we learn
more about the other characters, Avtar and Randeep, and their
relationship with each other. Avtar has good intentions but he, like the
others, has his own set of complications; family debts and undying love
for an ex-neighbour. Randeep is a middle class Indian, with a
problematic family situation and a shameful university experience, he’s
considered the lucky one –with a visa wife living across town who he
barely knows. Then there is Narindar, a British born Sikh, torn between
her family’s honour and her own moral struggles.
As
the story moves forward the characters relationships and lives become
increasingly strained. The desperation of the three men seeps through
the page as they discover what lengths they will go to to make money and
to survive. The stories of Tochi, Avtar and Randeep are eloquently
written, slowly revealing why each man leaves behind their family in
India. But unlike other books set around Indian immigration, this story
also looks at the guilt Indians raised in England feel towards their
fellow countrymen, seen through the eyes of Narindar.
It
is through these effortlessly told stories that Sahota composes a
deeply rich novel, that days after finishing I found myself still
picking it up and flicking through the pages.
