Sanghera, S: Marriage Material

Sathnam Sanghera was born in 1976. He is an award-winning writer for The Times. His first book, The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award and the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year. Marriage Material is his first novel, and has been shortlisted for the 2014 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and the 2013 Costa First Novel Award.

"A stunning novel ... touching and funny and feels so fresh ... it just leaps off the page. I adored it." -- Deborah Moggach "Having grown up in a corner shop in the West Midlands, I hoped that Sathnam Sanghera's Marriage Material would resonate. I was expecting acerbic wit, unsentimental tenderness and a Black Country setting - and it lived up to my stupid expectations. I really wanted to like it and I loved it - which never seems to happen. I usually damn things with high hopes. It was a lot of things I expected - funny and tender and scathing - but it's insanely gripping as well. So much of the newsagent detailing was completely spot on - there was plenty of my Dad in the character of Tanvir, plenty of all of my family in there really. A great achievement." -- Catherine O'Flynn, author of What Was Lost "Enormously enjoyable.Marriage Material isn't simply an ingenious exercise in updating.Sanghera's central subject, as in his much-praised memoir, The Boy with the Topknot, is prejudice.One of the novel's achievements is to keep you in mind of all this while maintaining a tone of shrewdly humorous tolerance. Sanghera's forte is wry comedy tinged with pathos.There is a concluding twist that has all the poisonous horror of finding a cobra coiled around boxes of confectionary in a corner shop.[A] warm, keenly observant and immensely appealing novel." -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "A satirical masterpiece . A razor-sharp disquisition on the trials of being an Asian newsagent.Handled with a poignancy that makes it hurt to read. But those tears are soon replaced by ones of laughter . As past and present collide in a violent, twisty finale, it is clear that the caste system of the old country is alive and dangerous. Sanghera is such an engaging and versatile writer that the pages fly by in a flurry of pathos, politics and paratha with extra butter. Not many readers will recognise this satirical mini-masterpiece as a reworking of the 1908 Arnold Bennett novel The Old Wives'