The Spoiled Heart

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

The Spoiled Heart is not just cleverly structured…but executed with rare literary intelligence

Critic, *Books of the Year*

One of Britain’s finest writers...page-turning drama

Observer, *Books of the Year*