The Spoiled Heart
A novel
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"The Spoiled Heart confirms Sunjeev Sahota's position as one of our essential novelists." --Karan Mahajan, author of the National Book Award Finalist The Association of Small Bombs
A brilliant and riveting story of ambition, love, family secrets, and unintended consequences, from "bold storyteller" (The New Yorker) and two-time Booker Prize nominee Sunjeev Sahota
Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town. She's returned with her teenage son to live in the run-down house at the end of the lane, and--though she's strangely guarded--Nayan can't help but be drawn to her. He hasn't risked love since losing his young family in a terrible accident twenty years earlier.
In the wake of the tragedy, Nayan's labor union, long a cornerstone of his community, became the center of his life: a way for him to channel his energies into making the world a better--fairer, as he sees it--place. Now, he's decided to mount a run for the leadership. But his campaign pits him against a newcomer, Megha, who quickly proves to be a more formidable challenger than he anticipated.
As Nayan's differences with Megha spin out of control, complicating the ideals he's always held dear, he grows closer to Helen--and unknowingly barrels toward long-held secrets about how their pasts might be connected. Suddenly, much more is threatened than his chances of winning.
In one sense a tragedy in the classic mold, tracing one man's seemingly inexorable fall, The Spoiled Heart is also an explosively contemporary story of how a few words or a single action--to one person careless, to another, charged--can trigger a cascade of unimaginable consequences. A vivid and multi-layered exploration of the mysteries of the heart, how community is forged and broken, and the shattering impact of secrets and assumptions alike, it is a blazing achievement from one of Britain's foremost living writers.
About this Author
SUNJEEV SAHOTA is the author of China Room, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal; The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature; and Ours Are the Streets. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.
Reviews
"Sahota has a surgeon's dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence. . . . This is a plot-packed, propulsive story. . . . There is an easeful precision to Sahota's prose reminiscent of Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri, a painful irony that evokes Percival Everett, and a grand human downfall alongside a battle of ideas that is Ibsenesque. . . . Activists haunt this book with the warning that to obscure history is to fail to learn from it, and that to divide is to be conquered." --The New York Times
"Me again, banging on about Sunjeev Sahota. I won't stop until you read him. . . . His new book, The Spoiled Heart, finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment. . . . 'I was always just trying to connect,' Sajjan tells us--pleads with us--as the novel accelerates toward a series of increasingly shocking revelations. But how much can really ever be known or should be? That's the paradox this brilliant novel wrestles with and one that will consume any reader who picks it up." --The Washington Post
"Gripping. . . . Perfectly-paced. . . . Sahota [has] remarkable skill in characterization. Every person, however narratively significant, feels intimately alive, partly because Sahota is so clever in his shifts of perspective. . . . His characters don't just appear, they emerge and grow, revealing of themselves a little more in every finely judged interaction. . . . Without avoiding individual culpability, Sahota builds a forceful portrait of collective moral failure and responsibility. . . . [He] is a political writer in the truest sense, one who understands that in the end, politics is nothing more than the friction and compromise of life as it is life." --The Guardian
"The pages fly. It's gripping . . . irresistible . . . brilliant." --The Times
"Gripping. . . . Sahota was named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013, and The Spoiled Heart shows why. Intellectually ambitious . . . smart and sophisticatedly written." --The Daily Telegraph
"The schism in the present-day political left supplies the conflict in Sunjeev Sahota's scruffy, passionate novel, The Spoiled Heart." --The Wall Street Journal
"A skilful page-turner about family and politics . . . [from] one of our most interesting writers. . . . In The Spoiled Heart, [Sahota] is determinedly upping his game. . . . He is an enormous sensitive novelist who works assiduously to shed light on life as it is lived, his characters always tangibly real, and fully three-dimensional. . . . Engrossing." --iNews
"[Sahota's] characterisation [is] rich and nuanced, and the portrayal of the psychological effects of urban desolation approaches that of Dickens in Our Mutual Friend. . . . The Spoiled Heart is a highly accomplished and timely political morality tale." --The Spectator
"Finely plotted. . . . The Spoiled Heart . . . places family and community--however fractured, as the title implies--emphatically at its centre. . . . Sahota is a writer for whom every character matters, no matter how minor. . . . [The Spoiled Heart is] a testament to Sahota's immense skill. . . . Each of Sahota's books builds on the ambition of the previous one: restless, inquiring, utterly topical. The Spoiled Heart may be his finest yet, with a tumultuous but perfectly sustained ending that proves both moving and revelatory." --Financial Times
"The beauty of Sahota's writing is that even the most unsympathetic and bristly character is not quite the villain. With his keen observation of human frailties and quirks, each has a point of view, justified in their eyes. . . . Sahota captures the essence of loneliness in a few sparse words. . . . A riveting story of ambition, love, family secrets, and unintended consequences . . . The Spoiled Heart is a multilayered exploration of the mysteries of the heart, how community is forged and broken, and the shattering impact of secrets and assumptions alike." --Desi News
"A beautifully constructed tale. . . . Sahota fascinates with his nuanced and multifaceted depictions of race and class, and he weaves in plenty of suspense as the union election unfolds. This is electrifying." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Sahota's] fourth novel [is] his most personal yet. Written with the depth of character and precision of language that distinguish the Derby-born author, The Spoiled Heart is a book about parenthood--the vulnerability, the effort, and, in one case, the shattering loss of it. . . . Sahota has established himself as one of our foremost writers with humanising novels that speak to the political moment. . . . He returns to the contemporary in The Spoiled Heart, the artfully structured story of one man's downfall, which combines a family mystery with a union leadership contest and addresses the way that identity politics divide the Left." --The Bookseller
"Sahota delivers a viscerally charged novel . . . [with] plenty of heart and suspense." --Booklist (starred review)
"Fearlessly contemporary and flawlessly observed, The Spoiled Heart confirms Sunjeev Sahota's position as one of our essential novelists." --Karan Mahajan, author of the National Book Award Finalist The Association of Small Bombs
"In this thoughtful, searching excavation of interlocking tragedies and contemporary politics, Sunjeev Sahota offers us a novel at once Shakespearean and thrillingly of our time. The Spoiled Heart hurts to read, but in all the good ways." --Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
PRAISE FOR SUNJEEV SAHOTA
"Sahota is an enormously gifted writer. . .who seems to have learnedas many tricks from TV as from Tolstoy, and has a jeweller's unillusioned eyefor the goods. . . . Lovely phrases glitter. . .He's both camera and painter,in a literary world that often separates those novelistic tasks." --James Wood, The New Yorker
"[Sahota] is a restrained stylist whose details bloom in the imagination. . . .[There is] respite, even solace, to be found in [his] preciseand exhilarating observation." --Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"Sahota knows how to turn a phrase, how to light up a scene,how to make you stay up late to learn what happens next." --Kamila Shamsie, The Guardian
"Sunjeev Sahota's writing is the stuff of miracles." --Bryan Washinton, author of Family Meal
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