The young bride’s tale: China Room, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation, and its Booker-shortlisted successor, The Year of the Runaways, follows illegal immigrants in Sheffield — where Sahota now lives, having been raised in Derby by Punjabi-born parents. China Room, his most autobiographical work to date, mines his adolescence in deprived 1990s Chesterfield and imagines that of his great-grandmother in rural Punjab.

In 1929, a 15-year-old girl is married to one of three brothers. On a remote farm, Mehar shares confined quarters with the best china and two other veiled brides —each competing to conceive a son first. Couplings take place in darkness, at their Machiavellian mother-in-law’s behest, so the girls can’t tell which brother is their husband (this unsettling premise is based on Sahota family legend). There’s an erotic thrill when Mehar falls in love with hers, for any bond feels illicit in this claustrophobic atmosphere.