It is just about a year since I read (and liked) Sunjeev Sahota’s first novel, Ours are the Streets; he’s another on my list of authors to keep reading. Sahota’s Granta piece, ‘Arrivals’, is taking from his forthcoming follow-up, The Year of the Runaways – and I think it works quite well as a stand-alone story.
We begin with one Randeep Sanghera showing a woman into her new flat in Sheffield; is he an estate agent, or perhaps her landlord? After seeing his living arrangements and work as a builder, we find that the truth is somewhat different – Randeep is one of several immigrants living in the same house, and the woman is who he married as a means of obtaining a visa. ‘Arrivals’ is an interesting set-up for the novel, but that’s what it feels like – a beginning. Still, Ours are the Streets worked best as a whole, and I suspect that The Year of the Runaways will be the same. I’m looking forward to finding out.
This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.
Sunjeev Sahota’s first novel, Ours are the Streets, is presented as the last testimony of Imtiaz Raina, a young British Muslim about to become a suicide bomber; it’s his attempt to explain himself to the people he loves. We follow Imtiaz from his time at university in Sheffield, where he falls in love with Becka, the white girl he marries and has a daughter with (and who then willingly converts to Islam). After his father dies, Imtiaz goes to Pakistan for the first time, where he falls in with a group of radicals – which eventually leads him to the present moment, and the account we are reading.
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