ince the publication of his debut novel, Ours Are the Streets, in 2011, Sunjeev Sahota’s literary output has worked emphatically within the geopolitical fabric of our time, reaching into the darker recesses of the British Asian experience and humanising those most vilified in the rightwing press – the homegrown terrorist (in Ours Are the Streets) and the undocumented migrants (in his Booker prize-shortlisted follow-up, The Year of the Runaways, in 2015). His third novel, China Room (published next month), continues in this vein. It’s a multigenerational love story set simultaneously against a backdrop of rural poverty in northern India in 1929 and of social deprivation in northern England in 1999. This sophisticated canvas resonates with news stories about farmers’ protests in Punjab and racial segregation in British towns, and speaks in diverse tongues of the subaltern – the illiterate teenage bride, the adolescent junkie – producing what Sahota describes as “a conversation [that runs through the novel] about intergenerational trauma and how it does continue to move forward”. The author’s oeuvre suggests he is preoccupied with race and racism. When we speak, though – he at home in Sheffield, me in Devon – during a two-hour break from childcare that his mum has stepped in to support, it’s a notion he is keen to refine. “Everyone always comments,” he says, “on the fact that my novels all have brown protagonists but what no one ever says is that there aren’t actually any characters in my novels who aren’t working-class.” Class, he insists, has been the overriding concern in both his writing and his life, in which racial prejudice is largely a symptom of a deeper malaise. “It’s kind of dispiriting to me,” he says, “how little we talk about class in the UK today. There are about eight working-class MPs in parliament [and yet] no one seems particularly concerned about that…” Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, where he lived for seven years in the working-class multiracial neighbourhood of Normanton, until both his parents, first-generation Punjabi immigrants, found themselves unemployed. “Dad lost his job as a labourer,” he says. “Mum lost her factory job. It was the late 80s and Thatcher was coming down hard on all sorts of industries. They decided to try to go into business, and bought the only shop they could probably afford in Chesterfield.” The move exposed Sahota and his brother to a community torn apart by miners’ strikes and pit closures, recession and unemployment. The two of them were “the only brown people in school” [at Springwell community college], where “everyone else was white and everyone was working-class”. “There was prejudice,” he says, looking back. “There was a lot of disaffection among the white community and I guess that disaffection gets harnessed by agents that have an anti-immigrant and an anti-working-class agenda, whether that’s the media or the right, [which] leads to displacement – that psychological defence mechanism where, because the person that is to blame isn’t in front of them, people redirect their anger towards the ‘other’… Prejudice is a form of paranoia.” But he also thinks that that dissatisfaction was based upon a lack of self-worth, a lack of jobs, rather than anything to do with race. “There was a lot of anger and a deep sense of betrayal that still hangs in the air in Chesterfield. I think that kind of despair and anger affected all races in the working class and I remember thinking that, as much as race, class is going to be a big factor for me… Growing up, I don’t remember wanting to be white, but I do remember for ever yearning to be a different class.” He recalls friends’ fathers, “former miners who were now stacking supermarket shelves in the evening, at supermarkets outside of where they lived because there was a lot of shame and feelings of being humiliated by the policies of the day. That kind of humiliation,” he believes, “destroys any tenderness and any kind of friendly feeling towards other people.” He moves on to recent news stories about working-class white boys and reports of their poor educational attainment. “It’s always suggested that that’s because brown or black working-class boys are performing better. But the comparison should really be between classes, between all races in the working class versus performance in the middle class.” In the summer before university (he studied maths at Imperial College London), Sahota had an epiphany when he discovered literature could open up new worlds. “I think I was always just looking for meaning,” he explains. “When I started reading, I felt a real sense that the conversation between the reader and the writer is something where meaning and truth is found. I must have responded to that incredibly strongly, because I did just bury myself in novels from that point.” That passion proved transformative. Now an assistant professor at Durham University, he lives in a middle-class suburb of Sheffield, a 15-minute drive and a world away from the shop in Chesterfield that his mum and dad still run. His wife is an accountant in local government, while their three kids go to “a diverse school”. “I just think that’s healthy,” he says. “It feels like they’re having a very different relationship with England. They’re not coming up against people whose lives have been decimated at a policy level. They’re not being made to feel like they’re the cause of anyone else’s pain.” He recalls a recent conversation with his eight-year-old son: “I was telling him some Punjabi word, some Punjabi food, and he was like, ‘Why do I need to know this?’ I said: ‘Because we hail from Punjab and it might be good for you to know these things, about where you’re from and where your grandparents are from.’ He said: ‘Yeah, Dad, that’s fine, but you do know I’m English, don’t you?’ I was just like… I had to just look away almost because… it’s not something I ever felt comfortable saying.” China Room speaks to that discomfort. Sahota had started the book with the intention of retelling “an old family legend”. His great-grandmother, “along with three other women”, had each been married to one of four brothers. “None of them knew which man she was married to,” he explains, “because they had to remain veiled the whole time. There was no electricity. It was in the middle of nowhere on a rural farmstead and they didn’t know who was the husband, so the story goes. “It was always spoken about,” he says, “in my family at least, with a degree of humour. You know, ‘those innocent, unquestioning ancestors’, in the way that we so often patronise people that lived long ago, even when it’s not that long ago. But if you spend even a moment thinking about it, that story just sounds quite dark to me!” In 2019, still struggling “to find the form” of that story, he went back to Chesterfield for a while to help run his parents’ shop while his dad recovered from knee surgery. “Being back there,” he says, “just brought back lots of feelings and memories”, and what began to take shape was the idea of the book as a kind of dialectic, connecting the “unknowable history, which was a history of my great grandmother”, with the tale of a young man, her descendant, coming back to that farm from England 70 years later while withdrawing from drugs. “The two strands of the novel talk to each other,” he says. “There’s this mutual haunting that’s going along – the echoes and the mirrorings and the whispers across time. “Both characters are seeking a kind of liberation, and they’re both suffering. They’re suffering differently, but they are both oppressed by society and they’re seeking a kind of self-rule. They’re both seeking something to connect with, the idea of home.” This approach, in which the book is a kind of conversation between disparate worlds, illuminates Sahota’s quest for meaning through the novel. “Dramatic truth is a collaborative thing: the idea that meaning is something that we all produce together, in the reading and the making of a book. “China Room is about the need for connection,” he adds, summing up, “and how connection, along with ideas of home, is actually a form of loss. Because you can never really hold on to it. You’re always just waiting for it to break. It’s always contingent.” China Room by Sunjeev Sahota is published by Harvill Secker on 6 May (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply