The Spoiled Heart

SUNJEEV SAHOTA

(HARVILL SECKER, 336 PP, £18.99)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £17.09 • TEL 020 7799 4064

Sunjeev Sahota’s eagerly awaited new novel is set in Chesterfield, at the edge of the Peak District, with its “vast measures of sunlit hills”. But their expansive promise of freedom is little more than a chimera for Nayan Olak, bound as he is by the chains of the past. Nayan is a legend in more ways than one: at the trades union to which he has devoted his entire working life and where he is now running for the leadership against an accomplished newcomer, and as a man branded by tragedy, since losing his mother and young son in a fire some 20 years ago.