China Room: The heartstopping and beautiful novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

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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: 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). 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. One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred, he counts, barely working his lips and standing unmoving in the yard, in the moon. The sun in the moon. He looks about him, from the quiet of the barn to the charpoys stowed upright under the veranda, their long round legs like rifles, all the way across to the china room, shuttered in silence. He’d skipped over the double-doors at the rear of the porch. Now, he walks towards them, applies his hand to the flaking paint and steals inside, to where Mehar has been instructed to wait for her husband.

cares how things are done. Rey sketches “a modest mind”– a CRTT system that has perception, can make deductive and A story of forbidden love that echoes across generations - from the prize-winning author of The Year of the Runaways. essentially a novel of interior life and sensation, plot.... lightly sketched, as with much else in the novel, subtlety.....refuses to let his historical characters act as though they are in a historical novel, dramatically hushed .... His timeline and life connects with that of his great grandmother, Mehar, who as a young girl has an arranged marriage. She, along with Harbans and Gurleen, marry 3 brothers on the same day, in a period of time when they are expected to live under oppressive 'traditions' and rigid expectations, subject to the whims of rumours and judgements of small communities. Their lives are separate from the brothers, and whilst the men know who they are married to, they are kept in the dark, ruled over by their overbearing mother-in-law Mai, who organises the couplings, where there is a strong desire for a son. Any questions as to the brothers are rebuffed, and Mehar is to find her efforts for clarity and independence bring danger and threats. This novel has quite a few flaws, but I really enjoyed reading it, thus four instead of three stars. The title-giving China Room has nothing to do with the country in Asia, but refers to a small chamber shared by three young brides (and where some porcelain from their mother-in-law's dowry is stored). It's the year 1929 in rural Punjab, and 15-year-old Mehar wonders which of the three brothers of the house is her husband, as all three girls have been married the same day and are kept unaware of who is whose husband - sexual meetings always occur in a windowless room, in almost complete darkness. When Mehar presumes that she has found out which one is her spouse, tragedy ensues...

One of the novel’s two stories, set in the late ’90s, has a young British man of South-Asian descent visiting his uncle and aunt in the Punjab, apparently to sweat out his heroin addiction. Well aware of his aunt’s displeasure at having him in her home, he asks his uncle if he might stay on the abandoned ancestral farm, which he ends up partially renovating with the help of friends he makes in the village.

Alan Turing and the ‘Hard’ and ‘Easy’ Problem of Cognition: Doing and Feeling,” Turing100: Essays in Honour of Centenary Turing Year 2012, Abbott, James Archer; Rice, Elaine M (1998). Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration. New York City: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-02532-7.

The author’s second novel “The Runaways” was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and was also winner of that year’s Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for literary second novels. 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.