Joan Mackenzie reviews China Room by Sunjeev Sahota

Hello I'm Joan and this book is China Room by Sunjeev Sahota. It's set in Punjab in 1929 when a woman who would become a ghastly mother-in-law is looking for three wives for her three sons. And she travels around the countryside and does find them and has them married off in one single wedding ceremony. After which these three young girls, and I use the word advisedly, are taken back to the family farm where they become essentially indentured servants. The thing is they're not allowed to look at in the daylight, these three men, or talk to them, so how does each of them know which of the guys she married? Fast forward about seventy years and there is a young Indian man who has been brought up in England but comes back to India looking to find some of his heritage and sort himself out after he's had a difficult life of all sorts of racism and addiction and he really needs a place to settle down and try and figure out exactly who he is. And he finds himself on that farm where those three women lived with their three husbands. Of course he is the descendant of one of them, but which one? It's really well done, beautifully written. I thought it was elegant and just really special actually.