The Spoiled Heart

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The blazing novel of love, community and politics, set at the edge of the Peak District, and with a deeply moving family mystery at its heart

From the twice Booker-nominated author of The Year of the Runaways and China Room

Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town and on his daily run out to the Peaks. She’s come back to the old house at the end of the lane, with her teenage son, Brandon, though nobody seems to remember much about her. Some trouble at school, back in the day. A certain defensiveness. Nayan is powerfully drawn to her, though he doesn’t quite know why.

He hasn’t risked love since he lost his young family in a terrible accident twenty years before. All his energy has gone into work at the union, trying to make the world better, fairer, as he sees it, as he would have wanted it for his son, and he’s now running for the leadership against accomplished newcomer, Megha. It’s a huge moment for Nayan, the culmination of everything he believes. But as he grows closer to Helen, and to the possibility that their pasts may have been connected, much more is suddenly threatened than his chances of winning.

A magnificent and multi-layered account of one man’s inexorable fall, The Spoiled Heart is an explosively contemporary story of secrets and assumptions whose consequences could never have been imagined. It is a stunning achievement from one of our very finest novelists.

'Sahota is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, how to light up a scene, how to make you stay up late at night to learn what happens next' - Kamila Shamsie, Women's Prize-winning author of Home Fire

'A wonderfully evocative storyteller' Independent

©2024 Sunjeev Sahota (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • An enormously sensitive novelist who works assiduously to shed light on life as it is lived, his characters always tangibly real, and fully three-dimensional. The Spoiled Heart balances its various narratives with subtle skill and a page-turning tension. Engrossing

    i

  • Reads like several books in one… The pages fly. If it doesn’t get Sahota on the Booker longlist again, I’ll be very disappointed

    The Times

  • Perfectly paced…[and] gripping… Sahota builds a forceful portrait of collective moral failure and responsibility… The Spoiled Heart feels genuinely, uncomfortably contemporary – a novel at once unafraid of judgment and admirably concerned about its consequences

    Guardian

  • Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence . . . 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

    New York Times

  • A smart and sophisticatedly written novel

    Daily Telegraph

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