In the village of Sunra in Punjab, India, legend has it that the "china room," in which women work sequestered from men, is blighted. After all, this is where a young bride, who had seduced her brother-in-law, spent most of her days. Sahota (The Year of the Runaways, 2016) pegs his mesmerizing novel on this tale. His outcast bride is Mehar Kaur. In a single ceremony, she and two other teenager girls are married to three brothers. Mai, the strong-willed matriarch, keeps the girls under strict supervision, but Mehar tries to forge a way out. Fast-forward many generations. Mehar's great-grandson from England visits the family farm in the hope of shaking a drug addiction. Haunted by the racism his family faces, he is visited by a local doctor friend, Radhika Chaturvedi. The narrative switches back and forth in time, from 1929 to 1999, painting remarkable portraits of women straitjacketed by society's strictures. Each woman uses every weapon at her disposal, including her sexuality, to quietly exercise her free will, sometimes at steep costs. Mehar wonders if the essence of being a man in the world is "not simply desiring a thing, but being able to voice that desire out loud." Simultaneously visceral and breathless, this is one knockout of a novel.

Sahota's engaging latest (after The Year of the Runaways) follows a teenage bride in rural Punjab during the British Raj. Mehar Kaur was five years old when she was promised to one of three brothers. In 1929, Mehar, now 15, is married along with two other women to the three, but Mehar still does not know which is her husband. The women live and sleep in the china room, and are alone with their husbands only on those nights when they meet in an unlit room for sex. Mehar mistakenly comes to believe that Suraj, the youngest, is her husband, leading her to drop her veil and sleep with him one afternoon. Suraj realizes what happened but doesn't want to give her up, and Mehar falls in love with him, leading to heartbreaking consequences. Mehar is seen and treated as property, yet Sahota manages to give her the illusion of agency, providing an empathetic look at how she would prefer the world to be. Woven within Mehar's affecting narrative is the less-developed story of her great-grandson, an unnamed man who narrates in 2019, recalling the summer of 1999, when he was 18 and left England for Punjab to battle his heroin addiction. Though the various parts are uneven, it's well worth the time. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)

Two teenagers come of age in India's Punjab region, one in 1929 and one in 1999. Although 15-year-old Mehar Kaur is a newlywed, she isn't sure who her husband is: She and her sisters-in-law, Gurleen and Harbans, spend most of their time doing chores or cloistered in a small room known as the china room, where they eat and sleep. The three brothers in the family had been married to the three women in a single ceremony, and their domineering mother, Mai, makes sure to keep Mehar, Gurleen, and Harbans in the dark. Each woman sometimes meets her husband at night in a "windowless chamber," but their identities remain a mystery. Mehar can't help wanting to find out the identity of her husband, and her curiosity winds up having disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, decades later, Mehar's great-grandson travels to India from England before his first year at university to visit family and detox from his addiction to heroin. He spends the summer living in and cleaning up the house where Mehar once lived, nursing a crush on an unconventional older woman who befriends him, and hearing incomplete stories about Mehar from locals who remember her as a legendary figure more than a real person. Sahota, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Year of the Runaways (2015), demonstrates his command through this novel's smooth, evocative language. His expert prose never resorts to pyrotechnics but conveys a great deal through deft description: The three young brothers have "unconvincing shoulders"; Mehar's husband speaks to her "not unkindly, but with the contingent kindness of a husband who knows he will be obeyed." But the novel's characters and plots remain frustratingly underdeveloped. By including both storylines in this short novel, Sahota limits his ability to deeply explore either, and the result feels like a missed opportunity. A beautifully written but narratively limited family saga. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.