The Spoiled Heart
  • Published: 23 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787304086
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $38.00

The Spoiled Heart

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
23 Apr 2024
EBook
18 Apr 2024
Hardback
18 May 2024
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond
Find local retailers

From the twice Booker-nominated author of The Year of the Runaways and China Room, The Spoiled Heart is a magnificent novel of love, community and politics, set at the edge of the Peak District, and with a deeply moving family mystery at its heart

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 teenaged 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 blazing achievement from one of our very finest novelists.
  • Published: 23 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787304086
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Sunjeev Sahota

Sunjeev Sahota is the author of Ours Are the Streets and The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and won the Encore Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the South Bank Sky Arts Award. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013. He lives in Sheffield.

Also by Sunjeev Sahota

China Room
See all

Praise for The Spoiled Heart

Billed to be his breakout… [The Spoiled Heart is] sure to be something special

Daily Mail, *Books to Look Out For 2024*

Incisive and poignant, his [Sahota’s] fourth novel cuts to the merciless core of the culture wars, engaging with issues of loyalty, identity, inequality and community, and tracing the unforeseen consequences of actions that ripple through the years

Bookseller

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

A smart and sophisticatedly written novel

Daily Telegraph

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

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

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

The Spoiled Heart finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment… a tragedy like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that has taken root in the mind of a haunted onlooker. How much can really ever be known or should be? That’s the paradox this brilliant novel wrestles with and one that will consume any reader who picks it up

Washington Post