Description

‘A debut collection of such precocity and aplomb that it stands comparison to the likes of Junot Diaz and Bryan Washington’ Observer

‘Moving, truthful, straight from the heart’ Neel Mukherjee

‘These are excellent stories, told with skill and verve’ Jon McGregor

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022
A HINDUSTAN TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022
WINNER OF THE TATA LITERATURE LIVE! FIRST BOOK AWARD

Here, beneath the planes circling Heathrow, various lives connect. Priti speaks English and her nani Punjabi. Without Priti’s mum around they struggle to make a shared language. Not far away, Chetan and Aanshi’s relationship shifts when a woman leaves her car in their drive but never returns to collect it. Gujan’s baba steps out of his flat above the chicken shop for the first time in years to take his grandson on a bicycle tour of the old and changed neighbourhood. And returning home after dropping out of university, Lata grapples with a secret about her estranged family friend, now a chart-topping rapper in a crisis of confidence.

Mapping an area of West London, these stories chart a wider narrative about the movement of multiple generations of immigrants. In acts of startling imagination, Gurnaik Johal’s debut brings together the past and the present, the local and the global, to show the surprising ways we come together.

Publisher Review

Delicate, controlled and moving portraits of the strange, poignant dislocation wrought by both distance and proximity * Colin Barrett * Moving, truthful, straight from the heart (and a very capacious heart too), the stories in WE MOVE announce the arrival of a promising young writer we will be talking about for years to come. Gurnaik Johal, welcome. * Neel Mukherjee * 'These are excellent stories, told with skill and verve. Gurnaik Johal has a sharp eye for details, an ear for the gaps and evasions in real dialogue, and a heart for the hopes and regrets that carry us through our lives. But most of all, he has the instincts of a storyteller, and in We Move he has put those instincts to great effect' * Jon McGregor * An assured and profoundly humane collection, rich in character and story. Johal relocates the human comedy to contemporary Southall and weaves in threads from the past and far across the world * Jo Lloyd, author of The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies * A whole universe of lives intricately connected and woven together in a way that is wholly surprising and unobvious * Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love * Deft and defiant. These stories are told with real heart and dazzling speed * John Patrick McHugh, author of Pure Gold * With this beautiful, kaleidoscopic, moving, staggeringly full-of-life debut collection of stories, Gurnaik Johal has catapulted himself into the front rank of the chroniclers of the country we live in. You don't know Britain until you've read We Move * Rahul Raina, author of How to Kidnap the Rich *