Abbott, James Archer; Rice, Elaine M (1998). Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration. New York City: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-02532-7. It was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn't quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could. Alan Turing and the ‘Hard’ and ‘Easy’ Problem of Cognition: Doing and Feeling,” Turing100: Essays in Honour of Centenary Turing Year 2012,

I find it hard to rate this book as it is not my culture that this book is centered on and I read that this book is somewhat based off of the author’s own family history, but I still want to express my opinions on this book the best that I can and this review might turn into a rant... If this book interests you, don’t let my dissatisfaction in the book hinder you from reading it, but do proceed with caution as this book effected me mentally while I read it. What fantastic night we had, the food was amazing and the service was great, nothing was to much trouble, all the staff looked after us and made us feel special..Would give Steve and his staff and the food a 5 STAR 🌟 rating..The prices were... very reasonable and food amazing2✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️The author was discussing his ideas for a third novel in interviews around 2015 but in time the form of the novel changed – originally it had been intended as a magic realism novel roaming across time and with a rather broad sense of place, but it has ended as a much quieter novel, while still drawing on the same genesis - a family legend about his great-grandmother, who with three other women was married to four brothers – but “None of them knew which man she was married to ….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.” There as he reflects on his upbringing – and the overt as well as persistent racism that his family faced after Thatcher-era redundancy lead them to give up their life in Derby (surrounded by family and kin) to set up a shop in an otherwise uniformly-white ex-mining town and which acted as a trigger for his addiction. He also starts a tentative involvement with a visiting Doctor and an initially awkward friendship with a local teacher (both around 20 years older than him) and the two start to draw him out of his addiction, while he also reflects on the locally well-known story of his great grandmother and discovers insights into his Aunt’s past. Sahota neatly intertwines the threads connecting the past and present, never forcing obvious connections, letting the reader make its mind how the common forces of love and friendship shape the protagonists. He manages to confront heavy themes of arranged marriage and largely gendered injustices through a tragic love story. His prose is delicate, beautiful and his plotting is spectacular, managing to foreshadow the inevitable without lessening the reader's desire to find out what will happen.

Re: the 1990s narrative—I also didn’t buy that parents would send a teenage heroin addict in the immediate throes of opioid withdrawal to another continent to stay with relatives he’d not seen in years, one of whom is extremely angered by the young man’s presence. I appreciate how this book allowed me to see into another way of life and another time period. I also enjoyed the writing style as the author has a way with words that are easy to read yet at the same time very well written. However, I had many problems with this book.An unnamed 18-year-old boy in the throes of a heroin addiction spends the summer in his ancestral village as he detoxes and attempts to salvage what is left of his life before heading off to university in the fall. During his stay, he falls in love with an older woman and discovers information about his great-grandmother and the china room. Later, she’ll wonder if that is the essence of being a man in the world, not simply desiring a thing, but being able to voice that desire out loud."

Dramatically hushed is about right. It seems I might have been expecting a lush, evocative Indian historical drama with deeply drawn characters set amongst political turmoil. A little bit Rohinton Mistry perhaps. This is... not that. Perhaps the fault lies with my expectations. Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home? It is also a dramatically hushed novel, unlike Sahota’s second, the Booker-shortlisted exploration of illegal immigration The Year of the Runaways, which teemed with voices and activity. Here, events are glanced at, elaborated in fragments and elliptically, the reader left to draw a line leading from the earlier story to the life that the narrator has lived in the north of England, complete with its painful incidents of exclusion, racism both covert and explicit.Mehar and two other young girls are married off in a single ceremony to three brothers. Their oppressive and controlling new mother-in-law, Mai, keeps them in the dark as to which of the brothers each has actually married. Their only encounters with their new husbands happen in the dark, behind closed doors, as they attempt to bear sons for the family. In the second strand, the narrator, Mehar's great-grandson, recounts a trip he made as an 18-year old heroin addict to the same part of Punjab, initially to stay with his uncle and aunt, and then on the now derelict family farm. The bulk of the book is the story of Mehar in 1929 Punjab. On her wedding day, she and two other women were married to three brothers. But none of the women knows which brother is her husband and the domineering family matriarch keeps the women separate except when the men visit in darkness attempting to conceive a child, preferably a son. Mehar wants to know which man is her husband and starts to note evidence until she comes to a conclusion. This conclusion sets the main story in this part of the book in motion.