Sunjeev Sahota Press Reviews
With poise, restraint and deep intelligence, Sahota feeds us big, difficult themes - segregation and freedom, revolution and empire - in a form that is unsweetened, fresh and nourishing. Surely this, his third novel, will propel him up the shortlists to the prizewinning status he deserves. -- Melissa Katsoulis - The Times, 'This Book Will Win Prizes'
Sahota combines great writing with amazing storytelling... his books are intelligent and beautifully written and very poised but also incredibly immersive, gripping and very moving. An epic in miniature, China Room is the kind of novel that reminds you why you fell in love with reading in the first place. -- Open Book - BBC Radio 4
China Room is the most personal of Sahota's novels so far, a beautifully realised blend of fiction and memoir... Sahota is a truly original novelist, his prose sparingly precise in its beauty, steeped in kindness and deep humanity. -- Ruth Scurr - TLS
Sahota gives his period narrative the same effortless immediacy as his present-day one, yet his novel works by stealth, quietly beguiling the reader into an almost painful intimacy... I loved it. -- Claire Allfree - Daily Mail
There is a scrupulous subtlety about that way that Sahota refuses to let his historical characters act as though they are in a historical novel... Sahota has demonstrated an ambitious need to adapt the specific and concrete to something less easy to pin down, complete with all the gaps and ruptures that life provides and art makes, even for a moment, tangible. -- Alex Clark - Guardian, Book of the Day
