Ours Are the Streets

Ours Are the Streets is the first novel by British writer Sunjeev Sahota, published by Picador on 7 January 2011. It is presented as the account that Imtiaz Raina, a young Sheffield-born husband and father, writes through the night for his wife Becka and their baby daughter Noor, trying to explain what has happened to him before he leaves home for the last time. Imtiaz has grown up in Yorkshire between two worlds, and when his father dies he travels to Pakistan for the first time, to bury him on the family's land near Lahore, on a road that leads on to Kashmir and Afghanistan. He comes back to Sheffield changed, convinced he has found a new sense of home, and the novel asks the reader to sit inside his voice, full of affection and yearning, and judge the journey for themselves.

About the book

Sahota wrote the novel in the evenings and at weekends around his day job in marketing, and he has said he was prompted to start it by the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Picador published it in January 2011 as a 240-page novel, and it was noticed at once: the Sheffield Telegraph reported it being mentioned in the literary supplements as one of the novels to look out for that year, and it was reviewed in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times. It has stayed in print and is now part of the Picador Collection, the publisher's series showcasing modern literature. For readers who know Sahota from his later, larger novels, this is where his work begins: one city, one voice, one family, and a question about home that his whole career has kept asking.

Who is Imtiaz Raina?

Imtiaz Raina is the novel's narrator, a young British man of Pakistani parents who was born and raised in Sheffield. The account follows him from his time at university in Sheffield, where he falls in love with Becka, whom he marries, and with whom he has a daughter, Noor, who in time chooses to convert to Islam herself. As a student Imtiaz seems comfortable in his Western life and argues with his parents' attitudes, wondering what the point is of dragging your life across entire continents if life is nearly over by the time it pays off. Yet he also feels that something is missing, and he wants his family to be happy. His narrative voice, as one early reviewer noted, is peppered with Yorkshire dialect, Urdu and Punjabi alike, the sound of a man with roots in East and West who cannot truly leave either behind.

Plot and themes

The turning point is his father's death. Imtiaz travels with the body to Pakistan, a country he has never visited, to bury his father near Lahore, and there he finds what he never knew he wanted: a deep sense of connection and heritage. But the source of that belonging, as the same reviewer observed, is one his family would not approve of, and the journey continues to Kashmir and Afghanistan. Back in Yorkshire he writes through the night, separated in spirit from the ordinary life he had built, preparing an act he believes his new sense of home demands of him, and trying to make Becka and Noor understand. The novel's themes are belonging and its price: what a second-generation son owes to the country he was born in, to the country his parents left, and to the family he has made, and how a feeling of emptiness can be answered in ways that destroy the very home he was looking for.

ਲੇਖਕ

Sunjeev Sahota was born in Derby in 1981, the grandson of Punjabis who emigrated to Britain from Punjab in 1966, and he studied mathematics at Imperial College London. He read his first novel at eighteen and wrote Ours Are the Streets around a marketing job, before The Year of the Runaways (2015) carried him onto the Man Booker Prize shortlist and China Room (2021) onto its longlist. This debut already holds the marks of the later books: Sheffield rendered from the inside, Punjabi and Urdu woven into English speech, and a refusal to stand outside his central character and condemn or excuse him. His own page in this Kosh tells his fuller story, and this Kosh also holds his two later novels.

Reception and legacy

Reviewers received the debut as a serious and unsettling piece of work. John Burnside, in The Times, called it genuine and poignant, a moral work of real intelligence and power. The Yorkshire Post wrote that what Sahota creates is not an exploration of the psyche of a man planning violence, but an exploration of a man, and The Sunday Times found its most chilling and most successful quality in how familiar, close and easy it all seems. The Guardian called it excruciatingly well written. A longer review at David's Book World praised it as a fine character study that shows how and why Imtiaz is discontent with life in England and how his time in Pakistan changes him, while noting that the last steps of his path are drawn with less clarity than the rest. Read today, the novel stands as the starting point of one of the most important British writing careers to come out of the Punjabi diaspora, and as an early, human attempt to understand, from inside one family, how a son of two homes can lose both.

What should I read next?

Readers who finish this novel should turn to Sahota's own The Year of the Runaways and China Room, both in this Kosh, which widen the same questions about migration, debt, faith and home into larger stories. The Kosh also holds Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan for an older generation's reckoning with home and violence at Partition.