ਦ ਈਅਰ ਆਫ਼ ਦ ਰਨਅਵੇਜ਼

The Year of the Runaways is the second novel by British writer Sunjeev Sahota, published by Picador in June 2015. It follows three young Indian men, Randeep Sanghera, Avtar Nijjar and Tarlochan Kumar, called Tochi, through one hard year in Sheffield, England, where they share a crowded house with ten other men and hunt for any work that will pay, and it binds their story to Narinder Kaur, the London-born Sikh woman whose marriage gives Randeep his visa. Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the novel won the Encore Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017, and it is widely read as the defining novel of the hidden migrant workforce that Punjabi families know from the inside.

About the book

Sahota wrote the novel after his Sheffield-set debut, Ours Are the Streets (2011), broadening his canvas from one narrator to a whole shared house. Thirteen young men live in that house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life, in the words of the European Union Prize synopsis. The book sweeps between India and England, and between childhood and the present day, so that every man who arrives in Sheffield brings a whole earlier life with him: the family debts, the disappointed fathers, the loves left behind. Its United States edition was published by Knopf, and Publishers Weekly, reviewing that edition, called it lyrical and incisive and a considerable achievement.

Who are the four runaways?

The four runaways are Randeep, Avtar, Tochi and Narinder, and the novel gives each a different door into England. Randeep Sanghera is sent from India to earn for his family after his father, a government employee, suffers a mental breakdown and Randeep himself has to leave his education; he travels on a marriage visa. Avtar Nijjar, his neighbour and the secret boyfriend of Randeep's sister Lakhpreet, is unfairly fired from his job as a bus conductor and buys his way onto a student visa at a terrible price, selling a kidney and taking a predatory loan, and his secret binds him to protect the chaotic Randeep. Tochi Kumar, a nineteen-year-old Dalit and former rickshaw driver from Bihar, arrives without papers after his family is killed, and will say nothing about his past. Narinder Kaur, born in London, agrees to be Randeep's visa wife out of her own wish to do good, against her devout family's wishes and her own coming arranged marriage, keeping his clothes in her cupboards across the city in case the immigration officers call.

Plot and themes

In Sheffield the men's hopes meet the city's hidden economy: long shifts, cash wages, employers and landlords who know exactly how little protection a man without secure status has. Hunger, debt and fear run through the year, and so do caste and rivalry, which the novel shows travelling with the migrants rather than being left at the border. Against that stands Narinder's story, which asks what the comfortable owe to the desperate: her faith moves her to help, and the book lets that question stay open rather than settling it. The European Union Prize citation set the novel beside Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance as a story of dignity in the face of adversity, and dignity, more than escape, is its real subject: what a person can hold on to when work, money and papers all say he is worth nothing.

ਲੇਖਕ

Sunjeev Sahota was born in Derby in 1981, the grandson of Punjabis who emigrated to Britain in 1966, and he has said the Punjabi spoken by his characters is the background music of the book, the sound of the world inside England that outsiders rarely hear. He studied mathematics at Imperial College London, read his first novel at eighteen, and wrote his first book in the evenings around a marketing job. The Year of the Runaways put his name on the 2015 Booker shortlist at the age of thirty-four; he now teaches creative writing at Durham University. His own page in this Kosh tells his fuller story.

Reception and legacy

The novel was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and, in 2017, the European Union Prize for Literature for the United Kingdom. Reviewers treated it as a major social novel: The Telegraph called it a work of social protest filled with fine drawing of human foibles and modern British life, while the Indian Express praised the way it tunnels through news headlines of immigration and caste debates. In 2020 The Independent listed it among the twelve best Indian novels. For Punjabi readers it holds a particular place: many of its men are Punjabi, its domestic interiors are Punjabi, and the journey it describes, from a family home in India to a shared house in a cold English city, is the journey thousands of Punjabi families have made or paid for.

What should I read next?

Readers who finish this novel often turn to Sahota's own China Room, also in this Kosh, which moves from the diaspora back to a Punjab farm in 1929. The Kosh also holds Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan and Chaman Nahal's Azadi for the older, Partition generation of Punjabi migration in fiction, and Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters for a Punjabi soldier's earlier journey to Europe.