The Spoiled Heart

＂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.

Sunjeev Sahota is the author of China Room, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal; The Year of the Runaways, which was short-listed 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.