Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town. She's returned with her teenage son to live in the run-down house at the end of the lane, and—though she's strangely guarded—Nayan can't help but be drawn to her. He hasn't risked love since losing his young family in a terrible accident twenty years earlier. In the wake of the tragedy, Nayan's labor union, long a cornerstone of his community, became the center of his life: a way for him to channel his energies into making the world a better place. Now, he's decided to mount a run for the leadership. But his campaign pits him against a newcomer, Megha, who quickly proves to be a more formidable challenger than he anticipated. As Nayan's differences with Megha spin out of control, complicating the ideals he's always held dear, he grows closer to Helen, and unknowingly barrels toward long-held secrets about how their pasts might be connected.
Me again, banging on about Sunjeev Sahota. I won’t stop until you read him ... Finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment. The story explores identity politics, that complicated intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation that, depending on your point of view, promotes equity or sanctifies discrimination. It’s the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth might have written ... Sahota throws so many disparate parts into this story that it’s something of a miracle when they begin to coalesce ... [A] brilliant novel.
Scruffy, passionate ... The scenes...are the product of Sajjan’s interviews and often have the rough, preliminary feel of an outline, somewhat blunting the poignancy of the revelations about Nayan’s and Helen’s private lives in the final chapters. The novel is strongest when it directly confronts its political questions.
It is the robin’s heartbeats that are particularly impressive in this vividly recreated puzzle of a novel. Despite the cut and thrust of union politics... it is the smaller domestic landscapes that linger in the mind ... A daring novel by a consistently daring novelist who returns repeatedly to the tension between those who leave and those who stay, those who represent and those who are represented.
