The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

A brilliant and riveting story of ambition, love, family secrets, and the devastating cascade a small, unthinking act can unleash, from “bold storyteller” (The New Yorker) and two-time Booker Prize nominee Sunjeev Sahota

Nayan Olak is mounting a run for general secretary of the union that has become the center of his life since losing his family in a tragic accident twenty years earlier, when he finds himself inexorably drawn to an inscrutable woman he keeps seeing around town. Passing the run-down house where she—Helen, he’s learned her name is—lives with her teenage son, Brandon, he wonders why they’ve returned to this place, and why they appear so guarded. As Nayan’s involvement with Helen and Brandon deepens, his differences with his rival in the race to lead the union, a privileged young woman named Megha, spin out of control. While he unknowingly barrels toward long-held secrets about how his and Helen’s pasts might be connected, 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 create a domino effect whose consequences could never have been imagined. A vivid 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.