| Secrecy -- Fiction. |
| Man-woman relationships -- Fiction |
| Labor unions -- Fiction. |
| Elections -- Fiction. |
| Labor leaders -- Fiction. |
| Racism -- Fiction. |
| Social classes -- Fiction. |
| Widowers -- Fiction. |
| Domestic fiction |
| Concealment |
| Industrial unions |
| Labor, Organized |
| Labor organizations |
| Organized labor |
| Trade-unions |
| Unions, Labor |
| Unions, Trade |
| Working-men's associations |
| Electoral politics |
| Franchise |
| Polls |
| Labor movement leaders |
| Leaders, Labor |
| Bias, Racial |
| Race bias |
| Race prejudice |
| Racial bias |
| Class distinction |
| Classes, Social |
| Rank |
| Domestic novels |
Available:
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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
"Will consume any reader who picks it up." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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 ago.
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 multilayered 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 (4)
Publisher's 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.)
Guardian Review
On the release of his third novel, 2021's Booker-longlisted China Room, Sunjeev Sahota noted with some frustration the limiting lens through which his work tends to be viewed. "Everyone always comments on the fact that my novels all have brown protagonists," he remarked, "but what no one ever says is that there aren't actually any characters in my novels who aren't working class." As is to be expected from a novelist whose work has addressed religious radicalisation, migration and intergenerational trauma, Sahota was probing challenging territory. He was also, it now becomes clear, laying the groundwork for his fourth novel, which leans decisively into exactly this ideological tension. At the centre of The Spoiled Heart is Nayan Olak. From a factory job in the small Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, Nayan has worked his way up to the point where he is running to be union leader. Espousing a politics firmly rooted in class analysis, he emphasises tangible material improvements: safer working conditions, fairer contracts, better pensions. Well known and well liked, he polls strongly, and seemingly can't lose. While Nayan benefits from the relative privilege that attends a middle-aged man who is largely affirming the status quo, Megha, his determined young opponent for the position, has to work far harder to be heard. Emphasising racial inequality and demanding meaningful change in a union that has always resisted it, she sees Nayan as "still stuck on the factory floor, spouting the tired old phrases", while Nayan considers Megha a privileged and ambitious young disruptor - someone who, as his friend says, "wants everything. Because she's always had everything." To Megha, Nayan's politics are retrograde and moribund, whereas Nayan sees in her agitations an ideology of divisiveness, the first step towards "separate buses". Every character feels intimately alive, partly because Sahota is so clever in his shifts of perspective. For a narrator, Sahota casts a Zuckerman-like alter ego: Sajjan, a writer from the same town who reconnects with a bruised Nayan and pieces together his unravelling. This additional layer of perspective provides both layered ambiguity and a broadened scope, allowing the novel to take in other lives and viewpoints: Helen, towards whom Nayan is increasingly attracted, and her son Brandon, who is rebuilding his life after a viral public shaming. As Sajjan probes, he gives shape not only to the collapse of Nayan's seemingly assured election campaign, but to the weight of grief that precedes and in some ways informs it: the death, in an unexplained fire, of Nayan's mother and infant son. Novels of this kind, with a full cast, multiple timelines and a sense of pace dependent on the careful release of revelation, demand certain narrative concessions, and Sahota can hardly be blamed for making a few. At times, particularly when he must arrange on his stage some scenery that will later be significant, he makes do with brisk, rather businesslike scenes that risk in their efficiency a slide into the outright schematic. Brandon's tale in particular - a young man fired from his job and harangued online for a "racist" incident that has, of course, been significantly misinterpreted - never quite achieves the depth and subtlety of the novel's other storylines. Further constraints arise from the conceit of having two characters not only express, but to a certain extent inhabit, opposing views. The rising tension and mounting hostility of the election is perfectly paced, and builds to a gripping public debate. But in its shaping of dramatic antagonism, it arguably filters out nuance. Narrative contingency forces Sahota to think largely in terms of opposition, which means the more complex question of why Megha and Nayan must be pitted against each other, and who benefits from that opposition, doesn't get the space it merits. Is ideological intransigence the only driver of this kind of conflict, or is a flawed and limited democratic system also to blame? Nayan and Megha, after all, are effectively competing to see which of them a predominantly white voting base finds the more palatable. What lifts this tightly patterned novel from the weight of its own mechanics is Sahota's remarkable skill in characterisation. 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. This is especially true of Megha. For much of the novel we see her precisely as Nayan does: as an antagonist. By the end we see her whole, her sense of hurt and injustice powerfully and movingly revealed. Likewise, Nayan's relationship with his ageing father - dutiful, resentful, fleetingly tender and yet at the same time repulsed beyond all healing - feels perfectly true, and perfectly judged. Because of this human depth, the feeling grows that perhaps Sahota is not so much relying on the well worn tropes of the small-town novel (the outcast returning to her hometown, the young man starting again, the well-regarded figure heading for a fall) as exploiting them. The Spoiled Heart, ultimately, is a novel of guilt, and in its closing stages we come to appreciate that its design is in part its message. Without avoiding individual culpability, Sahota builds a forceful portrait of collective moral failure and responsibility. Guilt, we ultimately realise, is not only individualised, it is diffuse and shared. In this, The Spoiled Heart feels genuinely, uncomfortably contemporary - a novel at once unafraid of judgment and admirably concerned about its consequences. Sahota 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 lived. Or, as Sajjan beautifully puts it, "The effort of life, the work of it."
Kirkus 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.
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.