China Room

China Room is the third novel by British writer Sunjeev Sahota, published in 2021 and longlisted for the Booker Prize that year. It tells two linked stories from one Punjabi family. In 1929, on a farm in rural Punjab, the fifteen-year-old bride Mehar Kaur lives with her two sisters-in-law in a small room called the china room, married to one of three brothers without being allowed to know which one. In 1999 her great-grandson, a young man from England, comes to the same farm to break his addiction to heroin, sleeps in that locked room and begins to piece together her story. Inspired in part by Sahota's own family history, it is a short, quiet novel about confinement, desire and the wounds one generation hands to the next.

About the book

China Room came six years after The Year of the Runaways had taken Sahota to the Booker shortlist, and it turns the same concerns inward, from the shared migrant house to the family farm. The Ploughshares review of the American edition, published by Viking in July 2021, notes that the book is inspired by Sahota's own family history and that a photograph at the back shows an elderly woman holding a newborn baby, presumably the author himself. The novel spans 1929 to 1999, with the narrator's telling of it reaching into 2019, and it does in under three hundred pages what his previous book did at epic length: it asks how people live inside arrangements they did not choose.

What is the china room?

The china room is the small room on the family farm where the three young brides eat, sleep and spend their days at their chores, named for a set of six decorated plates displayed on a high shelf, part of their mother-in-law Mai's own wedding dowry. The women are kept apart from the men of the house, and each is called at night, by Mai's choice, to a windowless chamber to lie with her husband, in the hope of a son. Because the brides are veiled and the meetings are in darkness, none of them knows which brother she is married to. Seventy years later the room stands locked and barred on the deserted farm, and Mehar's great-grandson, sent there to recover, takes the bars down so that he can sleep in the room where she slept.

Mehar in 1929

Mehar's story is set on a farm at Kala Sanghian in 1929, as resistance to British rule gathers around her world. She arrives in the household of the widow Mai, who had arranged her marriage to one of her three sons ten years earlier, when Mehar was a small child. With Gurleen and Harbans, the other two brides of a single wedding day, she cooks, cleans and waits under Mai's rule. Mehar is curious, playful and brave, and she sets out to discover which brother is her husband, studying voices and the calluses on fingers as she serves tea. Kirkus Reviews, summarising the plot, warns that her curiosity winds up having disastrous consequences, and the Literary Review tells how her feeling fixes on the wrong brother, the younger Suraj rather than the eldest, Jeet, who had been allowed to choose her: a love that becomes, as Ploughshares puts it, an act of resistance she will never give up, at a price the novel does not soften.

The great-grandson in 1999

The second story belongs to the unnamed narrator, who tells it twenty years on. In the summer of 1999, aged eighteen and addicted to heroin for more than two years, he travels from England to Punjab before his first year at university, and is sent to live alone on the family's abandoned farm. There he rides out his withdrawal, cleans and paints the old house, takes down the bars of the china room, and hears incomplete stories about Mehar from local people who remember her as a legend more than a person. A young doctor, Radhika, befriends him. His recovery, as both major reviews stress, is only partial, and the novel refuses to let his healing cancel her suffering: the two stories repair nothing for each other, but they explain each other.

Themes

Confinement is the book's governing image, literal in Mehar's room and her barred windows, inward in her great-grandson's addiction and the shame and racism he grew up with in England. Against it the novel sets small acts of will: a bride determined to know, a young man determined to stop. It is also a novel about what families pass down without words, the ghost of a story carried across continents and generations until someone finally asks about it, and about the women of 1929 Punjab, whose inner lives the historical record almost never kept and fiction here restores.

The author

Sunjeev Sahota was born in Derby in 1981, a grandson of Punjabis who emigrated to Britain in 1966, and China Room is his most personal book: Mehar's story grows from his own family's history, and the farm, the room and the plates belong to that inheritance. He had explored the Punjabi diaspora from the inside in Ours Are the Streets (2011) and The Year of the Runaways (2015), both set in Sheffield; here he reverses the journey, sending an English-born narrator back to the Punjab village world his family left. His page in this Kosh gives his life and honours in full.

Reception and legacy

China Room was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. The Literary Review called it an excellent and engrossing novel, intricate yet compact, unfolding in calm, controlled prose, and praised the way it avoids turning Mehar's story into easy therapy for the narrator. Ploughshares called it a deeply captivating and necessary novel. Kirkus Reviews was more divided, admiring the smooth, evocative language while judging both storylines underdeveloped, a beautifully written but narratively limited family saga. The disagreement itself marks the book's ambition: a very short novel carrying ninety years of one family's life. For Punjabi readers it has become one of the best known English novels set in the Punjab countryside, and a rare portrait of Punjabi women's lives in 1929 written from inside the family.

What should I read next?

Readers who come to China Room first often go next to The Year of the Runaways, also in this Kosh, for Sahota's larger novel of the diaspora the great-grandson's generation belongs to. For other English novels rooted in the Punjab countryside and its families, the Kosh holds Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man and Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers.