Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A heated contest for leadership of a contemporary British labor organization drives a novel that confronts difficult issues of race and class in that nation. When Nayan Olak and his former ally Megha Sharma, both of Indian descent, face off for the chance to serve as the first person of color to be general secretary of their union amid the Covid-19 pandemic, their campaign quickly degenerates into an ugly brawl, marred by allegations of racism and an accusation of a physical assault by one candidate against the other. The events are recounted by Sajjan Dhanoa, a writer who grew up in Nayan’s hometown of Chesterfield, England. There, two decades earlier, a fire killed Nayan’s mother and his young son as they slept in the apartment above the shop his parents owned. That event triggered the breakup of Nayan’s marriage, and he’s haunted by memories of the tragedy, especially as he cares for his father, who survived the fire and now suffers from worsening dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Amid the unrelenting pressure of the campaign, Nayan pursues a relationship with Helen Fletcher, a white native of Chesterfield who may have some connection to the fatal blaze, and whose son Brandon, an aspiring chef, has had his own disastrous encounter with racial conflict that prefigures the Nayan-Megha battle. Sahota frames the election contest as one pitting Nayan’s “transracial, working-class solidarity” against Megha’s “inclusionary neoliberalism,” which emphasizes racial identity, allowing their face-off to serve as a microcosm of these tensions within the larger British society. For the most part, that conflict emerges organically, save for a somewhat didactic rendering of it in the campaign’s climactic debate. Despite some occasionally awkward foreshadowing, the novel resolves both of its main plot threads in efficient, and satisfyingly surprising, fashion. A thoughtful exploration of race and class tensions in modern-day Britain and of the lingering effects of a long-ago tragedy. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.