The beautiful moments: Shuma Raha reviews Sunjeev Sahota’s ‘China Room’

This Booker longlisted novel throbs with the sense of alienation that is central to Sunjeev Sahota’s work

Towards the end of China Room, the unnamed first-person narrator, an 18-year-old recovering drug addict who has come down from his home in northern England to stay at his family’s derelict ancestral farm in rural Punjab, experiences a quiet epiphany. He realises that “life need not remain a wail of anger, that it can also be full of beautiful moments that just seem to arrive with the birds.” It’s a moment of existential clarity for the young man who has lurched into adulthood dealing with the searing racism of his home town, and shooting himself up with heroin to dull the pain. The novel, which has won a place in the Booker longlist, throbs with the sense of alienation that is central to Sunjeev Sahota’s work. The British Asian author’s debut novel, Ours Are the Streets (2011), explored the radicalisation of a British Muslim, the child of immigrant parents, who has borne the brunt of racism and feels he doesn’t quite belong anywhere. His second novel, the Booker shortlisted The Year of the Runaways (2015), narrated the experiences of a group of illegal immigrants from Asia. China Room explores the same themes of in-betweenness and the search for self-fulfilment. However, coloured as it is by the author’s own memories of growing up brown in a white working-class neighbourhood in an English town, it is less political and more deeply personal.