The Year of the Runaways

Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013 now gives us a sweeping, urgent contemporary epic about a year in the life of a group of young illegal Indian immigrants living and working together in the North of England. Randeep's middle-class family is sinking into poverty and he is sent abroad through a visa marriage to support them and make a new life. Avtar travels to England with Randeep on a student visa, the loss of which will lead him to make an unimaginable choice. Tochi is a dalit, an untouchable, who saw his family massacred and escaped to England with nothing but the scars on his back and a relentless will to live. Narinder is Randeep's visa wife, a pious Sikh whose connection to these men will prove both elusive and essential. Although they have little in common, these four will be drawn into an unforgettable relation as their fates and livelihoods become irreversibly entangled. Sprawling and urgent, magnificent in its depiction of adversity and the stubborn resilience of the spirit,The Year of the Runaways captures an extraordinary swath of human experience—and lives lived invisibly, under the radar, in insular communities or solitary desperation. At once shattering in its portrait of enveloping violence and adversity and astonishing in its defiant vision of hope. No one who reads this novel will ever look at the world in the same way again.