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 ... 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.
Writing with unsentimental candor, Mr. Sahota has created a cast of characters whose lives are so richly imagined that this deeply affecting novel calls out for a sequel or follow-up that might recount the next installment of their lives. (An epilogue, set more than 10 years later, is way too cursory and hasty.) At the same time, he’s written a novel that captures the plight of many immigrants, who count themselves lucky enough to have made it to the land of their dreams, only to worry that those dreams may be slipping out of reach.
“The Year of the Runaways is essentially The Grapes of Wrath for the 21st century: the Joads’ ordeal stretched halfway around the planet, from India to England. By following a handful of young men, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean. If you’re willing to have your vague impressions of the dispossessed brought into scarifying focus, read this novel.
...this intricately woven story of a group of Indians who have come to England seeking work powerfully reminds us of just what immigrants seek in the West ... Mr. Sahota’s superb novel helps to make the reality of migrants a little less unimaginable and a little more human.
Sahota, a British writer of Indian origin, has written not only a timely book, but a gut-wrenching, emotionally honest one, as well ... There are plenty of twists and turns to the story but Sahota's tension is created instead through the tenderness of his characters — their enormous restraint and empathy, their depth of feeling, combined with a willingness to hurt, to make bad decisions, to wound ... Sahota has done well. His writing is purposeful — there isn't an overwrought sentence. Not a big word in sight. I looked. Perhaps the only false note is that occasionally, inexplicably, in a world that is harsh and unforgiving, people are improbably nice.
What is striking about Sahota’s newer novel—in contrast to its predecessor and some of its Man Booker company—is its focus on mundane, unremitting struggle, not violent drama (although there’s some of that too). Sahota’s real challenge lies in finding a way to depict lives of daily degradation, poverty, and prejudice while avoiding tedium, and ultimately suggesting that a better future is possible ... Rather than seize upon political issues for the feel-good arc of a protest novel, Sahota subtly, powerfully, shows the devastating effect on his characters of narrow horizons.
There is a moment in The Year of the Runaways when a character declares that 'the best Indian families were the ones big enough to get lost in.' At almost 500 pages, Sahota's multi-stranded novel about young illegal Indian immigrants carving out a new life for themselves in the north of England is also big enough to get lost in. We do so, and emerge blinking and emotionally drained from a unique reading experience.
