China Room: The heartstopping and beautiful novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

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It is particularly effective in conveying the way the human spirit attempts to break free of internally or externally imposed imprisonment. One of the novel’s two stories, set in the late ’90s, has a young British man of South-Asian descent visiting his uncle and aunt in the Punjab, apparently to sweat out his heroin addiction. I find I am guilty of wanting this to be an entirely different novel but ultimately this remains a curiously underbaked effort. Cleaning up the property as a project to occupy his days, he discovers the room where she lived, and hears rumors about her legendary life, full of brutality, scandal, and betrayal.

The women, who live together in a room that houses the family china, are veiled in all their dealings with the men – except when they see them at appointed times in total darkness.Mehar thinks she knows which brother is hers, a belief that awakens a dangerous passion, and a quest for freedom that will have lasting consequences in another continent. From the start, we know something bad will happen to Mehar, so the atmosphere is tense, almost suffocating.

An English neoclassical mantel is located on the east wall, and Ferdinand Richardt's View on the Mississippi Fifty-Seven Miles Below St.The novel takes his title from the cramped china room – complete with willow-pattern plates—that the breeding mare (Mahar) must go to when requested by her officious mother-in-law to meet her “husband” and hopefully, “get with child. It’s not even 250 pages and tried to juggle two stories and a historical setting that never fully came to fruition for me. However, this form of storytelling does make me reflect in a more complicated and dynamic way about my own limited understanding of my ancestors and how little I know about the complex challenges they faced in their lifetime.