The Spoiled Heart

The blazing novel of love, community and politics, set at the edge of the Peak District, and with a deeply moving family mystery at its heart



From the twice Booker-nominated author of The Year of the Runaways and China Room



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 stunning achievement from one of our very finest novelists.



'Sahota is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, how to light up a scene, how to make you stay up late at night to learn what happens next' - Kamila Shamsie, Women's Prize-winning author of Home Fire



'A wonderfully evocative storyteller' Independent