The Spoiled Heart

The Spoiled Heart is the fourth novel by British writer Sunjeev Sahota, published on 16 April 2024 by Viking in the United States and Harvill Secker in the United Kingdom. Set in Chesterfield, the Derbyshire town of the Crooked Spire, it tells the story of Nayan Olak, a 42-year-old factory worker from one of the town's few Sikh families, who is running to become general secretary of his union, Unify. Twenty years earlier Nayan lost his mother and his young son in a fire that was never explained, and he has poured his grief into union work ever since. Now a young rival, Megha Sharma, challenges everything he believes about solidarity, a woman from his past returns to town, and the two stories move towards each other in ways he cannot see coming.

About the book

Sahota's first three novels looked at migration and home across generations: a Sheffield son travelling to Pakistan in Ours Are the Streets (2011), undocumented workers in The Year of the Runaways (2015), and a Punjab village and its diaspora across a century in China Room (2021). The Spoiled Heart stays in one English town in the present day, and its publisher presents it as a story of ambition, love, family secrets and unintended consequences. Publishers Weekly, reviewing it in January 2024 ahead of publication, gave its measure: a beautifully constructed tale, with a hardcover of 320 pages in the Harvill Secker edition. The novel is told to the reader by a writer named Sajjan, who has come back to Chesterfield and takes Nayan as the subject of the novel he is writing, so the story arrives in pieces, through meetings and small revelations, rather than in a straight line.

Who is Nayan Olak?

Nayan Olak works at the air conditioner factory in Chesterfield where his union represents the workers, and he has given his adult life to that union: colleagues quoted in reviews describe him, in effect, as the union itself. His mother and his four or five-year-old son, the reviews differ slightly on the boy's age, died in a fire at the family shop twenty years before the novel opens, and the person who set it was never caught. His father Pyara, now living with dementia, still needs his care. Nayan has not risked love since the fire. When the novel opens he is the clear favourite to lead the union, and would be its first general secretary of colour, running on the politics he has always held: that working people of every background stand or fall together, and that class comes first.

Plot and themes

Two arrivals unsettle that settled story. The first is Megha Sharma, a young and privileged newcomer at the union office who stands against him as the change candidate. Where Nayan argues for solidarity across race, Megha argues that workers of colour need explicit protection of their own, pointing to a recent attack on a retail worker in the union, and her campaign carries the language of decolonisation into the election. What begins as a friendly rivalry hardens, in NB Magazine's account, into a smear campaign on both sides. The second arrival is Helen Fletcher, who has returned from London to the run-down house at the end of Nayan's lane with her teenage son Brandon. Brandon has lost his job as a cook at a private school after remarks to a Black student were misunderstood, and Nayan hires him to help care for his father, and slowly, against her guardedness, he and Helen begin a relationship. Helen carries a past that connects her to Nayan in ways he does not realise, and as the election and the romance deepen, the mystery of the fire moves back towards the centre of his life. The themes are the ones the reviews name: grief that has been worked around rather than lived through, solidarity and what it should mean now, and how a few careless words, in a workplace or a campaign, can set off consequences nobody intended.

ਲੇਖਕ

Sunjeev Sahota was born in Derby in 1981, the grandson of Punjabis who emigrated to Britain from Punjab in 1966, studied mathematics at Imperial College London, and lives in Sheffield. The Year of the Runaways was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015 and China Room was longlisted in 2021, which makes him a two-time Booker nominee, and The Spoiled Heart is his fourth novel in thirteen years. It returns to the ground of his first book, the Punjabi presence in the industrial north of England, but where Ours Are the Streets stayed inside one young man's head, this novel watches a whole town judge one of its own. His own page in this Kosh tells his fuller story, and this Kosh also holds his three earlier novels.

Reception and legacy

Publishers Weekly called the novel electrifying, praising its nuanced and multifaceted depictions of race and class and the suspense it weaves through the union election. NB Magazine called it a pacey page-turner in which politics is blended with a family mystery and an unlikely romance, and praised the way its small revelations are drip-fed towards a shocking climax, while noting that the framed narration by Sajjan takes some adjusting to. The AEU News review called it a powerful, multilayered excavation of contemporary debates about solidarity, equality and discrimination, and of the risk of losing a shared sense of humanity. The Guardian's words, quoted by its publisher, were perfectly paced and gripping, and the New York Times called it a plot-packed, propulsive story. Read alongside his earlier work, the novel marks Sahota's move from the migration story to the state of the country his grandparents migrated to, told through a Sikh union man whose certainties are tested from every side at once.

What should I read next?

Readers who come to this novel first can follow Sahota backwards through this Kosh: China Room for the Punjab roots of families like Nayan's, The Year of the Runaways for the generation that crossed, and Ours Are the Streets for the first, raw version of his Sheffield and Chesterfield world.