bookshelf

THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS

Name: THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS
Author: Sunjeev Sahota
ISBN: 978-1-101-94610-7

by Sunjeev Sahota ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2016

When the place you’ve left is burning and the one you’re in doesn’t want you, how do you find your way home?

bookshelf

The intertwined lives of four Indian immigrants in England reveal broad truths through heartbreaking details.

It seems like a common enough premise at first: several young people from struggling families flee their native country to find a better life—or better work, at least. But as Sahota (Ours Are the Streets, 2011) demonstrates in his rough-around-the-edges second novel, every immigrant story is wholly individual, no matter how familiar it feels. Weaving back and forth through chronologies and perspectives, he traces the origin stories of Randeep, Avtar, and Tochi as they make their ways from India to Sheffield, an industrial city in the north of England, in the early 2000s. Lonely Randeep must support his “visa wife,” a religious Sikh and fellow immigrant named Narinder, who sought the role out of a sense of service, leaving an arranged engagement, a violent brother, and a disappointed father behind. When Randeep’s sense of obligation toward her turns to affection, Narinder folds further inward until she meets fiery Tochi, who belongs to the destitute Dalit (“untouchable”) caste. He squats in the apartment below hers, and they gradually connect through their shared alienation from the parts they’re supposed to be playing—but it’s an impossible pairing, of course. Piety and fury don’t get happy endings. Neither does delicate Avtar, who winds up working a series of filthy, treacherous jobs despite his student visa. England is rarely kind to this quartet, thwarting their efforts at betterment with police raids, poverty, and other trials. Sahota peppers these scenes with a riot of minor characters that can be overwhelming, but his observations of our broken social system are razor-sharp.<

When the place you’ve left is burning and the one you’re in doesn’t want you, how do you find your way home?

Pub Date: March 31, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-94610-7

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SPOILED HEART
by Sunjeev Sahota

- BOOK REVIEW
CHINA ROOM
by Sunjeev Sahota

bookshelf

THIS TOWN SLEEPS

by Dennis E. Staples ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020

A knotty portrait of Ojibwe life with some winningly uncanny touches.

bookshelf

A young gay man reckons with love, tribal lore, and a decades-old murder in this rangy debut novel.

Marion, the main narrator of Staples’ first book, isn’t where he wants to be, and that’s back in his hometown on Minnesota’s Ojibwe reservation. A brief stint in the Twin Cities ended with busted relationships, but his best romantic prospect in the area is deeply closeted former high school classmate Shannon, who has the unglorious job of attending to animal carcasses on a resort island. Still, Staples, an Ojibwe writer, wants to suggest that the best way to move forward is by facing one's past head-on. The notion arrives first via symbolism: As children, Marion and his friends spooked each other by saying a dog died under the merry-go-round at the playground, and now that dog reappears (or seems to) in Marion’s presence. That incident sparks Marion’s investigation into his high school days, in particular the murder of Kayden, a basketball star who became a father shortly before he was killed. Plotwise, the story is a stock hero’s-journey tale, as Marion lets go of his skepticism of Ojibwe spiritualism, discovers the truth about Kayden’s death, and finds a community along with a degree of emotional fulfillment. But credit Staples for complicating the story in some interesting ways, from shifting perspectives from Marion to other townspeople (with a particular emphasis on Native women), a smirking humor that cuts the mordant atmosphere (“What do Indians call a lack of faith?” “Being white”), and a graceful handling of Ojibwe culture. In its later stages, the story seems to keep sprouting tentacles as new characters and revelations emerge, which saps some of its narrative drive, but it returns affectingly to the messy fates of Marion and Shannon.

A knotty portrait of Ojibwe life with some winningly uncanny touches.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-64009-284-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- AWARDS
Lambda Literary Award Finalists Are Revealed

bookshelf

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

by James Baldwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 24, 1974

bookshelf

This new Baldwin novel is told by a 19-year-old black girl named Tish in a New York City ghetto about how she fell in love with a young black man, Fonny. He got framed on a rape charge and she got pregnant before they could marry and move into their loft; but Tish and her family Finance a trip to Puerto Rico to track down the rape victim and rescue Fonny, a sculptor with slanted eyes and treasured independence. The book is anomalous for the 1970's with its Raisin in the Sun wholesomeness. It is sometimes saccharine, but it possesses a genuinely sweet and free spirit too. Along with the reflex sprinkles of hate-whitey, there are powerful showdowns between the two black families, and a Frieze of people who — unlike Fonny's father — gave up and "congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives." The style wobbles as Tish mixes street talk with lyricism and polemic and a bogus kind of Young Adult hesitancy. Baldwin slips past the conflict between fighting the garbage heap and settling into a long-gone private chianti-chisel-and-garret idyll, as do Fonny and Tish and the baby. But Baldwin makes the affirmation of the humanity of black people which is all too missing in various kinds of Superfly and sub-fly novels.