The Spoiled Heart — Sunjeev Sahota

“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.