The spoiled heart / Sunjeev Sahota.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Sahota (China Room) returns with a beautifully constructed tale of a British Indian factory worker who attempts to find solace in his labor union and a new romance many years after losing his mother and son in a fire. Nayan Olak, 42, is running for general secretary of the union, which represents workers at the air conditioner factory in Chesterfied, England, where he's dedicated his life. Megha Sharma, who's also of Indian descent, opposes him in the race. Though either of them would be the organization's first nonwhite general secretary, Megha positions herself as the "change candidate," claiming their fellow workers of color need protection from hateful assaults like the recent one on a retail worker in their union. Nayan, with his "curdled charisma," focuses his campaign on interracial working-class solidarity. Meanwhile, Nayan's old acquaintance Helen Fletcher returns to Chesterfied from London with her teenage son, Brandon, who was fired from his job as a cook at a private school after his remarks to a Black student were misunderstood as racist. Nayan hires Brandon to help take care of his father, who has dementia, and attempts to befriend Helen. Though she initially brushes him off, they eventually begin a romantic relationship. 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. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

Barely managing to care for his aging father at home, Nayan Olak has cobbled together a hardscrabble existence on the back of tragedy. Years ago, his young son and wife perished in a fire, a tragedy with a long shadow he can't escape. Today he's running in an election to lead the workers' union that has been his anchor for decades. But he must compete against Megha Sharma, who might share Nayan's Indian ethnicity but is of a much richer class. Against this roiling background of status and race tensions and simmering animosity, Nayan befriends a white woman, Helen Fletcher, and lends a helping hand to her teen son, Brandon. The two story lines intersect in raw and fierce ways when it becomes clear Helen might have played a greater role in Nayan's past than he could have imagined. Sahota (China Room, 2019) delivers a viscerally charged novel as his sympathy for worker rights takes center stage again. "Class is not a cultural categorization, it's a social and economic one," Nayan argues. Though discussions about such issues can at times turn heavy-handed, there's plenty of heart and suspense in the latest from Booker Prize--finalist Sahota.

Kirkus Book Review

A heated contest for leadership of a contemporary British labor organization drives a novel that confronts difficult issues of race and class in that nation. When Nayan Olak and his former ally Megha Sharma, both of Indian descent, face off for the chance to serve as the first person of color to be general secretary of their union amid the Covid-19 pandemic, their campaign quickly degenerates into an ugly brawl, marred by allegations of racism and an accusation of a physical assault by one candidate against the other. The events are recounted by Sajjan Dhanoa, a writer who grew up in Nayan's hometown of Chesterfield, England. There, two decades earlier, a fire killed Nayan's mother and his young son as they slept in the apartment above the shop his parents owned. That event triggered the breakup of Nayan's marriage, and he's haunted by memories of the tragedy, especially as he cares for his father, who survived the fire and now suffers from worsening dementia and Parkinson's disease. Amid the unrelenting pressure of the campaign, Nayan pursues a relationship with Helen Fletcher, a white native of Chesterfield who may have some connection to the fatal blaze, and whose son Brandon, an aspiring chef, has had his own disastrous encounter with racial conflict that prefigures the Nayan-Megha battle. Sahota frames the election contest as one pitting Nayan's "transracial, working-class solidarity" against Megha's "inclusionary neoliberalism," which emphasizes racial identity, allowing their face-off to serve as a microcosm of these tensions within the larger British society. For the most part, that conflict emerges organically, save for a somewhat didactic rendering of it in the campaign's climactic debate. Despite some occasionally awkward foreshadowing, the novel resolves both of its main plot threads in efficient, and satisfyingly surprising, fashion. A thoughtful exploration of race and class tensions in modern-day Britain and of the lingering effects of a long-ago tragedy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.