We Move (Gurnaik Johal)

Gurnaik Johal
We Move

This is a pre-release book with a blank acknowledgements page lent to me by a friend who I used to work with with a shared love of literature. So I can't publish this until April 2022. It's a debut novel by a very promising young author. The book is a number of short stories with common themes some of which are tied up at the end. Most characters are Sikh and although you can guess the meaning of a lot of the Punjabi (I assume it's that language) words I did find myself Googling them to get the exact meaning. If I were to be critical it's that this does seem like a collection of very short stories and the characters are not very developed especially little about what they look like and for most not a lot of character depth. It feels a little like the author has put a lot of his ideas for story lines into his first book and to be honest I feel that there is a lot more that could be developed as the stories have a lot of potential. There again I'm not a writer. I wonder if the stories will be more fully developed in the future. A lot of the book is tied together with the Sikh massacre in 1984 and also a thread about whether what we do is predetermined or whether we are subject to fate. Along those lines seems to be a thread about how decisions taken, or forced upon us, or a path followed, lead to major effects in our lives. Funny as I've now started a book about mid life crises which also has that "what if I did that when I was 30" theme common to many who re-evaluate their lives.