Marriage Material

Marriage Material

Summary

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

Reviews

  • Enormously enjoyableMarriage 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

About the author

Sathnam Sanghera

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.
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