The Year of the Runaways

Starred review from January 25, 2016
Lyrical and incisive, Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel is a considerable achievement: a restrained, lucid, and heartbreaking exploration of the lives of three young Indian men, and one British-Indian woman, as their paths converge in Sheffield, England, over the course of one perilous year. In India, Avtar Nijjar, unfairly fired from his job as a bus conductor, is engaging in a secret relationship with Lakhpreet Sanghera, the teenage daughter of a neighboring family. When Lakhpreet’s 19-year-old brother, Randeep, is forced to abandon his education, and their government-employee father suffers a mental breakdown, Randeep is sent to England to make enough money to keep the family afloat. Lakhpreet arranges for Avtar to accompany him, although Avtar must sell a kidney and accept a predatory loan to afford a student visa, while Randeep travels on a marriage visa. His bride is the London-born Sikh Narinder Kaur, whose desire to help the desperate Randeep runs counter to her family’s pious religiosity and her impending arranged marriage. Rounding out the cast is the 19-year-old Dalit Tochi Kumar, arriving in England illegally after his entire family is massacred by radical Hindu nationalists. Quarrelling, parting, and finding solace in one another in unexpected ways, Sahota’s characters are wonderfully drawn, and imbued with depth and feeling. Their struggles to survive will remain vividly imprinted on the reader’s mind.

May 30, 2016
Garewal begins the audiobook of Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel awkwardly; it sounds as if he’s reading word by word rather than narrating the sentences. As soon as he gets into dialogue, however, he becomes livelier, and his narration takes on an easier, more conversational rhythm and tone. Three Indian men are thrown together in Sheffield, England, where they desperately try to survive and avoid getting deported. Finding jobs to make enough money to live and send to their distraught families is a nightmarish challenge. Tochi, a former rickshaw driver from a low caste, is badly scarred, physically and emotionally. Avtar, a middle-class Punjabi on a student visa, seeks only to sustain himself and his now-impoverished family. Randeep is a “visa husband” who has contracted for a one-year marriage to Narinda, a young woman who only wants to do good deeds despite the family conflicts this engenders. Garewal handles a variety of Indian accents quite handily. A Knopf hardcover.