The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation - In this post you will get all the information about ‘The Year of the Runaways’. The proper and easy explanation of the novel is written below, i hope will read the summary and know everything about ‘The Year of the Runaways’. The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Their biggest concern is an immigration raid, and what they’ll do if they’re caught. They try to stay under the radar, working in menial jobs, such as sewer maintenance and food service, so no one notices them. Their main fear is going to back to the misery they left behind in India. We learn about each of their histories in turn through flashbacks.

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Introduction

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways is the second novel by British author Sunjeev Sahota. Published in June 2015, it was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was awarded with a European Union Prize for Literature in 2017 (for the UK).

The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar; and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the chaotic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call.

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - The novel focuses on the experiences of migrant workers in Britain. A critic for the Indian Express notes that "the novel tunnels through news headlines of immigration and caste debates" in a way that is "one of its transcendent strengths". The Telegraph commented that "the novel feels like a work of social protest" with "enough fine drawing of human foibles, of different idioms and of modern British life to fill up several lesser novels."

In 2020, Emma Lee-Potter of The Independent listed The Year of the Runaways as one of the 12 best Indian novels. The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation , The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary.

About the Author

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - Sunjeev Sahota FRSL (born 1981) is a British novelist whose first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in January 2011 and whose second novel, The Year of the Runaways, was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.

Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, and his family moved to Chesterfield when he was seven years old. His paternal grandparents had emigrated to Britain from Punjab in 1966. After finishing school, Sahota studied mathematics at Imperial College London. As of January 2011, he was working in marketing for the insurance company Aviva.

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - Sahota had not read a novel until he was 18 years old, when he read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children while visiting relatives in India before starting university. He bought the book in the airport before flying to India. The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary - While he had studied English literature at GCSE level, the course did not require students to read a novel:

· We had to do a Shakespeare, and we did Macbeth. We had to do a pre 20th-century text, and we did a play, She Stoops to Conquer. We had to do poetry and we did Yevgeny Yevtushenko. But no novels.

·After Midnight's Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day. In an interview in January 2011, he stated:

·It was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn't quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could.

·In 2013 he was included in a Granta list of 20 best young writers, released 20 years after the magazine first published such a list.

·In June 2018 Sahota was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

·In 2019, Sahota started teaching creative writing to undergraduates at Durham University, where he is Assistant Professor.

Works

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation - Sahota's first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in January 2011 by Picador. He wrote the book in the evenings and at weekends because of his day job. The novel tells the story of a British Pakistani youth who becomes a suicide bomber. Sahota was prompted to start writing the book by the 7 July 2005 London bombings. According to the Sheffield Telegraph, the book is "being mentioned in literary supplements as one of the novels to look out for in 2011". Ours are the Streets has been reviewed in a number of national newspapers, including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.

His second novel, The Year of the Runaways, about the experience of illegal immigrants in Britain, was published in June 2015 and was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

China Room was published in 2021. It interweaves the stories of a child bride living in a village in 1920s Punjab and her British-born and raised great-grandson, who returns to the village in 1999. The novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

Summary

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - In the first half, the book alternates between shorter chapters about the four characters in Sheffield, and novella-length sections about each of them prior to their arrival there. It is a risky strategy – if just one of the sections sags by comparison with the others the whole structure could collapse – but Sahota is more than equal to the task.

The first story is that of Tochi, a chamar or “untouchable” in an India of heightened Hindu nationalism where a man risks everything by merely being perceived as trying to break out of the strict rules of caste. Sahota is not, however, the kind of writer who will seize on instances of the most violent forms of bigotry – throughout the novel, his eye is drawn more frequently to the smaller moments of injustice that wear people down and also the acts of grace that they can barely believe possible.

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation - Tochi’s story allows us to understand why he holds himself separate from the other men with whom he lives and works in Sheffield, and the following novella-length section bringing together the tales of Avtar and Randeep reveals why their relationship is caught somewhere between acquaintances and friends. Former neighbours, whose lives in the world of the middle class in India prove to be precarious, they are propelled, respectively, by love and shame to travel to England in search of work.

The final story is that of Narindar, a devout British Sikh woman for whom goodness is at the heart of religious practice. But what does it mean to be good in an unjust world? What is a devoted daughter to do when her idea of what is moral runs counter to her family’s notions of honour? What is a law-abiding British woman to do when what she believes to be the path to virtue runs counter to the law? The question of the responsibilities borne by the citizens of the more fortunate nations of the world towards those from other countries is at the heart of Narindar’s story, but it is told in the most intimate of ways, as an issue that is not theorised but deeply felt. And the question remains open all the way to the end.

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota - The second half of the novel moves forward, as the characters’ relationships with each other grow more tangled, and their situations more fraught. Tabloid phrases such as “scam marriages”, “illegal workers”, “abuse of student visas” are placed within the context of lives filled with love and desperation. Yet the book should not be read for its worthiness rather than for its literary qualities. Sahota is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, how to light up a scene, how to make you stay up late at night to learn what happens next.

This is a novel that takes on the largest questions and still shines in its smallest details – an encounter between a lonely old Englishman and the Indian boy from a call centre whom he befriends over the phone, never dreaming the boy might arrive at his doorstep; the misunderstanding of a woman who thinks a man is deliberately snubbing her when the reality is that he is unable to read the messages she leaves for him; the impossibility of friendship between young men who know there are too few scraps to go around and too many dependants relying on them to be the ones to grab hold of the scraps.

The Year of the Runaways By Sunjeev Sahota Plot Summary , Introduction , About the Author and Explanation - Through these stories and others, Sahota moves some of the most urgent political questions of the day away from rhetorical posturing and contested statistics into the realm of humanity. The Year of the Runaways is a brilliant and beautiful novel.