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Stolen History by Sathnam Sanghera

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‘This book was like putting Britain on the therapy couch’: Sathnam Sanghera on Empireland

The truth about the British Empire and how it shaped us

Stolen History

An accessible, engaging and essential introduction to the British empire for readers aged 9+, by bestselling author of Empireland, Sathnam Sanghera. 
 
You've probably heard the word 'empire' before. Perhaps because of the Roman empire. Or maybe even the Star Wars films. 
 
But what about the British Empire? Why don't we learn much about this? And what even is an empire, anyway? 
 
This book will answer all the important questions about Britain's imperial history. It will explore how Britain's empire once made it the most powerful nation on earth, and how it still affects our lives in many ways today - from the words we use, to the food we eat, the sports we play and even to every grown-up's fixation with a good cup of tea. 
 
Because how can we ever make the world a kinder, better place for the future, if we don't know the truth about the past? 
 
 
"I've resisted suggestions that I write a kids' book on empire on the grounds that I didn't want to sanitise the history. But I think I've found a tone that allows me to be both honest and entertaining. I'm really excited that kids might soon have access to knowledge about the British Empire that I only stumbled across at the age of 45. Becoming at ease with this history is essential to Britain becoming a saner country." - Sathnam Sanghera 
 
 
SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK

Something that really comes across in the book is Sanghera's faith in young people...to form their own judgements about the British Empire.

Conversational...with humour that feels ideally pitched to the older children it is aimed at.

Stolen History is the perfect book for every school. All our young people need to know the truth about the British Empire. This book is accessible, expertly written and hugely important.

Jasbinder Bilan - Award Winning Children’s Author

Accessible whilst imparting broad knowledge, appealingly pitched but deeply serious, this historically rigorous book is a must-read for any child who wants to know the basic facts of empire but also to gain an accurate sense of the wide variety of colonial activities which happened during four centuries of British colonial rule. Stolen History will inform a whole generation. Parents should read it too!

Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage, University of Leicester

Stolen History is a truly remarkable achievement: an historically accurate, diligently researched and nuanced account of the British Empire that is also gripping for younger readers. I know of no other writer who could have accomplished such a feat.

Professor Alan Lester FRHistS, Professor of Historical Geography and Professor of History, La Trobe University

Sanghera brilliantly demonstrates that history doesn't have to be dumbed down to be made accessible, nor does it need to be sensationalized to seem relevant. Written with integrity and a deep commitment to reveal how the past has shaped our present, the book will make young readers engage with history as more than just entertainment and it will encourage them to ask new questions.

Kim A. Wagner, Professor of Global and Imperial History, School of History Queen Mary, University of London

Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976. He entered the education system unable to speak English but went on to graduate from Christ's College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Language and Literature. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards twice, for his memoir The Boy With The Topknot and his novel Marriage Material. Empireland has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards of 2022, and inspired both the Channel 4 series Empire State of Mind and Sanghera's children's book about the British empire Stolen History. He lives in London.

An accessible, engaging and essential introduction to the British empire for readers aged 9+, by bestselling author of Empireland, Sathnam Sanghera. 
 
You've probably heard the word 'empire' before. Perhaps because of the Roman empire. Or maybe even the Star Wars films. 
 
But what about the British Empire? Why don't we learn much about this? And what even is an empire, anyway? 
 
This book will answer all the important questions about Britain's imperial history. It will explore how Britain's empire once made it the most powerful nation on earth, and how it still affects our lives in many ways today - from the words we use, to the food we eat, the sports we play and even to every grown-up's fixation with a good cup of tea. 
 
Because how can we ever make the world a kinder, better place for the future, if we don't know the truth about the past?

Marriage Material

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.

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

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’ Tale, but everyone will feel richer for its uncompromising take on race relations in the Black Country.

A stunning novel ... touching and funny and feels so fresh ... it just leaps off the page. I adored it.

His poignant memoir of growing up in 1980s Wolverhampton won Sathnam Sanghera an army of admirers as well as a clutch of nominations and awards. Five years on, he has turned his literary talents in the direction of fiction, with this funny and insightful first novel the result … A thoughtful examination of the complexities of modern Britain … An engrossing, entertaining and rewarding read.

Smart, funny and melancholic, Sanghera's debut novel goes straight to the heart of family life

A novel that ingeniously ‘shoplifts’ (his word) characters and elements of plot from Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale…This dangerous material is handled with a darkly comic lightness of touch, and an impassively detached ironic tone that may owe something to Bennett — like Bennett, Sanghera makes good use of local newspaper cuttings, letters to the editor, and contemporary fashion magazine material, which gives an unobtrusively authentic period flavour to each passing phase. This book is so well researched you hardly notice the work that’s gone into it…The mix of comedy, satire, realism and optimism is nicely judged.

Subtle and often very funny prose … What lifts this novel far above cliché is Sanghera’s deft sense of irony and self-awareness regarding his subject matter … The family’s unfolding history is beautifully counterpointed by real-life events in the local political landscape … Sanghera’s tender and funny book is a cracking and pacy read.

Sathnam Sanghera’s entertaining story is a “remix” of Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale … Playful wit infuses the novel … But behind the humour and the plot twists, is an important novel that explores an often overlooked part of this country's history … That the story of the Victorian mercantile class told in Bennett’s novel is so easily transposed onto the community Sanghera grew up in nearly a century later is absolutely fascinating, and by recognizing and exploiting this with excellent effect, he examines the nationwide story of British immigration through the prism of the Punjabi Sikh experience.

A funny and touching read ... Brilliant … A superbly updated version of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. At its heart, this is a simple story of family … yet, all this is handled throughout with the lightest of touches, so that on reaching the end, you want to begin again to pick up the subtle nuances of this book

It is very good and has many of the qualities found in Bennett’s masterpiece: acute observation of society and societal change, thoroughly imagined and well depicted characters, mastery of naturalistic detail, and generosity of tone. It is very enjoyable … It does what the novel can still do better than any other art-form: showing you that other people think and act in a manner very different from your own, but one which is equally valid … It is [a novel] which celebrates that most necessary of qualities, kindness … It is acute about human frailty, but also understanding of this. It is often funny and its great merit is its humanity. It’s worthy homage to Arnold Bennett.

Marriage Material is a comic feast, full of delectable matter. It does what only the best comic fiction can do: it robes important social subjects in laughter. Then, too, by the end, I felt I knew Sathnam Sanghera’s characters intimately and felt so warmly about them, I didn’t want them to go: no mean feat, given that I’ve never been into a Wolverhampton corner shop, either in Enoch Powell's scurrilous heyday or more recently. This is a splendid debut.

Marriage Material is a wonderfully engaging book, full of heart and wit. Its exploration of what it means to feel torn is rich and subtle. Its characters stay with you. Its jokes make you laugh in the night.

It will take virtually no pages for you to be hooked

Sanghera’s Marriage Material has humour [and] cultural relevance…Anyone who’s grown up as a second generation immigrant can relate to the themes seen here … I’d heartily recommend Marriage Material to anyone who needs a little push to reconnect to where they’ve come from, be it Copenhagen or Punjab.

Sanghera’s story captures a time of extraordinary changes in Wolverhampton […] Discrimination,  mixed-race marriages and the changing face of Britain appear in both Sanghera’s timelines.  As the novel progresses, the stories collide and there are startling revelations, humour and mystery.  It is smartly crafted, weaving in droll observations about immigrant life and the defensiveness of south Asians living away from home, while also providing a thoughtful commentary on the casual racism of Britain, the tedium of always being out of place and the complexities of belonging in an increasingly heterogeneous world.

Sanghera ... tells a larger story about the big political and economic struggles of the past half-century. He examines changing attitudes to immigration, the rise of big-box stores and the hollowing out of Britain’s industrial centres ... Sanghera, who grew up in Wolverhampton himself, does a good job of capturing the complications of progress.

Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976. He entered the education system unable to speak English but, after attending Wolverhampton Grammar School, graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1998. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards twice, for his memoir The Boy With The Topknot and his novel Marriage Material, the former being adapted by BBC Drama in 2017 and named Mind Book of the Year in 2009. He has won numerous prizes for his journalism at The Financial Times and The Times, including Young Journalist of the Year in 2002 and Media Commentator of the Year in 2015. He lives in London.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD AND LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 
 
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOY WITH THE TOPKNOT AND EMPIRELAND 
 
'Enormously enjoyable' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'A satirical masterpiece' TELEGRAPH 
 
'Sanghera's tender and funny book is a cracking and pacy read' OBSERVER 
 
'A stunning novel . . . touching and funny and feels so fresh . . . it just leaps off the page. I adored it' DEBORAH MOGGACH 
 
'Impressive' GUARDIAN 
 
'Entertaining' INDEPENDENT 
 
When Arjan returns to the Black Country after his father's death, his family's corner shop represents everything he tried to leave behind. But his mother insists on keeping the business open, and Arjun finds himself being dragged back from London, and forced into big decisions about his own relationship. Yet Arjan's story isn't the first and it won't be the last: Surinder and Kamaljit, two sisters, a generation back in the family, also experienced their own share of betrayals and loyalties, loves and regrets. 
 
Praise for Empireland 
 
'A fascinating reckoning with a history of empire' GUARDIAN 
'I only wish this book had been around when I was at school' SADIQ KHAN 
'Balanced and insightful' THE TIMES 
'This immensely readable book is very timely' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'An important book' NEW STATESMAN

How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

Empireland

EMPIREWORLD IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW 
 
WINNER OF THE 2022 BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR NARRATIVE NONFICTION 
 
***THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE CHANNEL 4 DOCUMENTARY 'EMPIRE STATE OF MIND'*** 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'The real remedy is education of the kind that Sanghera has embraced - accepting, not ignoring, the past' Gerard deGroot, The Times 
_____________________________________________________ 
 
EMPIRE explains why there are millions of Britons living worldwide. 
EMPIRE explains Brexit and the feeling that we are exceptional. 
EMPIRE explains our distrust of cleverness. 
EMPIRE explains Britain's particular brand of racism. 
 
Strangely hidden from view, the British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification. In his bestselling book, Sathnam Sanghera shows how our imperial past is everywhere: from how we live and think to the foundation of the NHS and even our response to the COVID-19 crisis. 
 
At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Empireland is a groundbreaking revelation - a much-needed and enlightening portrait of contemporary British society, shining a light on everything that usually gets left unsaid. 
_______________________________________________________ 
 
'Empireland takes a perfectly-judged approach to its contentious but necessary subject' Jonathan Coe 
 
'I only wish this book has been around when I was at school' Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London 
 
'This remarkable book shines the brightest of lights into some of the darkest and most misunderstood corners of our shared history' James O'Brien 
 
 
Sathnam Sanghera, Sunday Times bestseller, February 2024

I only wish this book had been around when I was at school

A fascinating reckoning with a history of empire

A balanced and insightful study of the British empire and contemporary attitudes towards it

This immensely readable book is very timely. The account by Sanghera, a former FT writer, is simultaneously personal and scholarly. It addresses many of the questions that are now urgent subjects of public debate - such as Britain's role in the slave trade and the connections between empire and multiculturalism

Financial Times, Best Books of 2021: Politics

An important book and that's not a phrase to use lightly. It's an exposé and a reminder of how conveniently the British have rewritten the past and buried the bones of their shame . . . a necessary, uncomfortable and illuminating read

Robust . . . an illuminating examination of the "toxic cocktail of nostalgia and amnesia" that still hugely influences our life today

This remarkable book shines the brightest of lights into some of the darkest and most misunderstood corners of our shared history

[Empireland] should be on the compulsory reading list of every secondary school in the country

Lucid but never simplistic; entertaining but never frivolous; intensely readable while always mindful of nuance and complexity - Empireland takes a perfectly-judged approach to its contentious but necessary subject

Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera is a salutary reminder of the dark side of our past. I spend my time trying to help resolve armed conflicts from Myanmar to Nigeria that are largely caused by the crass errors of our ancestors. It helps to understand how those came about

A gracefully written book, but its real beauty lies in its complete absence of dogmatism ... Empireland is not an angry diatribe. It's a sensitive, often uncomfortable commentary on the stubborn influence of empire ... The real remedy is education of the kind that Sanghera has embraced - accepting, not ignoring, the past

This remarkable book shines the brightest of lights into some of the darkest and most misunderstood corners of our shared history. As urgent as it is illuminating . . . Sanghera's meticulous research and passionate advocacy combine to create an irresistible case for reviewing much of what we think we know about the reality and legacy of the British Empire

In this witty and multi-faceted portrait of our nation, the award-winning journalist and novelist looks with great acuity at how the Empire wrought contemporary Britain

[An] impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain's imperial past and present ... a moving and stimulating book that deserves to be widely read

Excellent ... he is a good guide to the complexities of the issues ... And he is largely positive about Britain and its future

The best book on the British empire for a very long time

A scorching polemic on the afterburn of empire

This account of how much of our "island story" was written in other countries deserves to be widely read. His decency and talent remind us of how much we owe to all those immigrants from our empire who came to make their lives here and too often (but happily not always) had to face hostility with a racist hue. The racism was frequently sired by our imperial past

A really interesting look at the history of empire - everything we're not taught at school - and how learning that history could change the way we view our country today

This thoroughly engaging and incredibly important book must be read by everyone. The sometimes heartbreaking read is enlightening and transformative. This remarkable work should be included in school curriculum... The informative book will undoubtedly continue to improve the understanding of future generations and perhaps even shape them

Empireland argues passionately that our identity has been shaped for the worse by empire, and that we must do more to debunk national myths

In the wake of personal epiphany we glimpse with Sanghera pathways of transformative potential ... a simple but profound response - this searching introspection and a quest for new horizons, combined with a readiness to sit with the contradictions of it all

My book of the year so far. A really thoughtful, deeply researched and elegantly written look at the legacy of empire

Very well written ... decent, balanced and wise. His decency and talent remind us of how much we owe to all those immigrants from our empire who came to make their lives here

In Britain, imperialism is everywhere - though we often choose not to see it. From the way we travel and the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism and wealth, it is central to the way we think and conduct politics. In his bestselling book, Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of modern Britain - including the exceptionalism that inspired Brexit and our response to the COVID-19 crisis - is rooted in our imperial past. 
 
Empire is foundational to modern Britain yet is barely taught in schools or mentioned in museums. At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Empireland is a groundbreaking revelation - a much-needed and illuminating portrait of modern British society with the power and potential to change minds.

A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies

The Boy with the Topknot

'Could not be more enjoyable, engaging or moving' Observer 
 
"It's 1979, I'm three years old, and like all breakfast times during my youth it begins with Mum combing my hair, a ritual for which I have to sit down on the second-hand, floral-patterned settee, and lean forward, like I'm presenting myself for execution." 
 
For Sathnam Sanghera, growing up in Wolverhampton in the eighties was a confusing business. On the one hand, these were the heady days of George Michael mix-tapes, Dallas on TV and, if he was lucky, the occasional Bounty Bar. On the other, there was his wardrobe of tartan smocks, his 30p-an-hour job at the local sewing factory and the ongoing challenge of how to tie the perfect top-knot. 
 
And then there was his family, whose strange and often difficult behaviour he took for granted until, at the age of twenty-four, Sathnam made a discovery that changed everything he ever thought he knew about them. Equipped with breathtaking courage and a glorious sense of humour, he embarks on a journey into their extraordinary past - from his father's harsh life in rural Punjab to the steps of the Wolverhampton Tourist Office - trying to make sense of a life lived among secrets. 
 
'I absolutely loved it. Heartbreaking and wonderful. He writes beautifully' Maggie O'Farrell 
 
'Tragic, funny and disturbing. It will challenge you, and may even change you' Carole Angier, Independent 
 
Published in hardback as If You Don't Know Me by Now

"It's 1979, I'm three years old, and like all breakfast times during my youth it begins with Mum combing my hair, a ritual for which I have to sit down on the second-hand, floral-patterned settee, and lean forward, like I'm presenting myself for execution." 
 
For Sathnam Sanghera, growing up in Wolverhampton in the eighties was a confusing business. On the one hand, these were the heady days of George Michael mix-tapes, Dallas on TV and, if he was lucky, the occasional Bounty Bar. On the other, there was his wardrobe of tartan smocks, his 30p-an-hour job at the local sewing factory and the ongoing challenge of how to tie the perfect top-knot. 
And then there was his family, whose strange and often difficult behaviour he took for granted until, at the age of twenty-four, Sathnam made a discovery that changed everything he ever thought he knew about them. Equipped with breathtaking courage and a glorious sense of humour, he embarks on a journey into their extraordinary past - from his father's harsh life in rural Punjab to the steps of the Wolverhampton Tourist Office - trying to make sense of a life lived among secrets. 
 
 
Published in hardback as If You Don't Know Me by Now

Sathnam Sanghera

Empireworld

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