The Spoiled Heart

A Novel

By: Sunjeev Sahota

Narrated by: Esh Alladi

Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

“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 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 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.

©2024 Sunjeev Sahota (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“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.”—The New York Times

“Me again, banging on about Sunjeev Sahota. I won’t stop until you read him . . . His new book, The Spoiled Heart, finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment . . . ‘I was always just trying to connect,’ Sajjan tells us—pleads with us—as the novel accelerates toward a series of increasingly shocking revelations. But 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.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A novel that examines local politics, issues of race, gender and identity, combined with the open wound of a past trauma, is no simple task. In another writer’s hands, the disparate plot strands might simply collapse. It is testament to Sahota’s immense skill that not only do they hold together, but that the novel’s most disturbing revelations are left almost to the final page . . . Each of Sahota’s books builds on the ambition of the previous one: restless, inquiring, utterly topical. The Spoiled Heart may be his finest yet.”—Financial Times