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Sathnam Sanghera

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Marriage Material Kindle Edition

by Sathnam Sanghera (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 708 ratings

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A London graphic designer is suddenly forced to take over his South Asian family’s convenience store in this “hugely enjoyable” novel (The Sunday Express).

“Sathnam Sanghera’s witty first novel chronicles three generations of a Punjabi Indian family in England. After his father dies, Arjan Banga, a graphic designer in London, returns to the dreary West Midlands to help run the family convenience store. The move causes tension with his white fiancée, Freya, whom his mother regards with passive-aggressive disapproval. Arjan must explain to customers that ‘as a Sikh I was not expected to marry my cousin or join Al Qaeda’ and smile politely at their interpretations of his name (‘Mind if I call you Andy?’). Torn between familial duty and the freedom he enjoys in London, he gains unlikely clarity from his dimwitted friend Ranjit—a pot-smoking devotee of Steven Seagal movies, Xbox and hip-hop. Arjan’s woes are comic, but the novel’s depth is evident as it sheds light on the economic and political struggles of immigrants.” —The New York Times

From an author whose work has been shortlisted for Costa and PEN Awards, this novel about a man trapped between British and Punjabi culture is “filled with details of the lives of Sikhs from the late ’60s to the riots of 2011. The divisions within the Sikh population are poignantly and comically captured in the protests against the Wolverhampton Transport Department’s ban on turbans” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

“Sanghera’s precise, hilarious rendition of voices and cultural details is the signal pleasure of a novel rich in humor, history, and heart.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Editorial Reviews

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Praise for Marriage Material

"Sanghera's novel is singularly realist, filled with details of the lives of Sikhs from the late '60s to the riots of 2011. The divisions within the Sikh population are poignantly and comically captured in the protests against the Wolverhampton Transport Department's ban on Turbans..."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Sanghera's precise, hilarious rendition of voices and cultural details is the signal pleasure of a novel rich in humor, history, and heart."
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Sanghera reaches hearts and minds with an unforgettably companionable narrator.”
—Booklist

"A hugely enjoyable read, packed with plot twists and laugh out loud set pieces, but it is also tender and insightful."
—The Sunday Express

"A satirical masterpiece...Sanghera is such an engaging and versatile writer that the pages fly by in a flurry of pathos, politics, and pandemonium."
—Sunday Telegraph

"Moving and affecting...There is a really, really fine novelist here."
—Kamila Shamsie (author of Home Fire), Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

"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."
—The Financial Times

"Smart, funny and melancholy, Sanghera's debut novel goes straight to the heart of family life."
—Marie Claire

About the Author

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B079MG749T
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions (February 16, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 16, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4740 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 324 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,342,219 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #268 in Indian Literature
- #2,152 in Humorous Literary Fiction
- #3,335 in Dark Humor

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4.2 708 ratings

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Sathnam Sanghera

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Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands 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. 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. His third book, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Been Shaped Modern Britain became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on release in 2021, and was named a Book of the Year at the 2022 British Books Awards.

Empireland also inspired Empire State of Mind, the acclaimed two-part documentary for Channel 4 for which he earned a Best Presenter shortlisting at the 2022 Grierson Awards, and Stolen History: The Truth about the British Empire and How it Shaped Us, which went to No 1 on several children’s books charts when it was released in 2023. He has been awarded two honorary doctorates and won numerous awards for his journalism, including Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002, Media Commentator of the year in the 2015 Comment Awards and the Edgar Wallace Trophy for Writing of the Highest Quality at the 2017 London Press Club Awards. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contribution to historical scholarship in 2023.

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4.2 out of 5

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Marianna

A good book.

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2020

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I knew next to nothing about Indian culture, but I was curious . Now know more. The story and characters were also good. I am always grateful to people for describing minor details and everyday things. Because they create the picture like particles of sand make a beach.

2 people found this helpful

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royal_guju

Bumcrack of the West Midlands

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2016

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The increasing liberalization of British social rules and values may be good news for women and minorities, but it must make hard work for writers of contemporary fiction. It’s a nicer world in which we can all own property and marry whom we like, but it removes much of the obvious drama from modern life and leaves all the best stories in history. Where would Romeo and Juliet have been if he could have just sent a text message? Or Pride and Prejudice if Lizzie Bennet had gone off to work in the City?
This time it’s fiction, intertwining the story of a family of Sixties Punjabi immigrants with their descendant, Arjan, the present-day narrator who opens the book with a razor-sharp disquisition on the trials of being an Asian newsagent. “There are few more stereotypical things you can do as an Asian man, few more profound ways of wiping out your character and individuality, short of becoming a doctor, that is. Or fixing computers for a living. Or writing a book about arranged marriages.”
Arjan has escaped from dead-end Wolverhampton and made a successful career for himself among the moneyed ironists of the London media scene. But suddenly, as he is on the verge of secularly, sinfully marrying his English girlfriend, he is called back. And what’s worse, he must inhabit the eye of the storm: selling tobacco to racist pensioners by day and living in the marriage and mores-obsessed Sikh community of his childhood by night.
Arjan’s return is precipitated by the death of his father, which is handled with a poignancy that makes it hurt to read. But those tears are soon replaced by ones of laughter as we spool back to encounter his mother and aunt growing up in a world of forbidden bouffant and mad aunts. We also meet his overgrown bad boy of a best mate, so indulged by his family that he is able to live the life of a weed-smoking teen with a fast car and secret girlfriends. Seeing how his life could have been, Arjan is torn between revulsion and envy. But 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.

5 people found this helpful

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Dilsher Virk

The real expat Punjabi/Sikh community - described with sensitivity and humor - vivid literature

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2015

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A sane voice in the expat Punjabi wilderness of blind prejudice and bling. Brings to life the real world of the Punjabi/Sikh diaspora in a vivid and sensitive portrayal. You will get to know these families and their trials and tribulations as if you were part of the family. A literary tour-de-force. A modern Somerset Maugham with the humor of P.G. Woodehouse. Very enjoyable reading.

3 people found this helpful

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Discerning Reader

A good start but the reader may struggle later on.

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2014

The book starts well. It is the story of yet another family that has come to live in England. Their cultural background is Punjabis from India, and Sikh by religion. They live/have lived in Wolverhampton. In many ways it is a typical story where cultural differences between generations could clash . at the same time, there are details of many people of Asian origin who worked hard in the corner shop, in this case, in Wolverhapmton.

Sanghera writes well and his detailed accounts make the reading gripping. In the first part of the book, the reader is also informed about the friendships and the tensions that existed amongst the Sikhs themselves, and between the Sikhs and the local ‘white’ people.

There are many interesting observations about differently themes which initially stop the story from being a traditional immigrants versus indigenous communities focus. Quite an innovative approach to religion is that “ the theory of religion tells you little about the etiquette of Punjabi life or the actuality of Punjabi culture which is rarely written about, because one of the defining things about it is that it is defiantly un-self-examining. In practice, Sikh society often runs counter to the principles of the religion, being for thing highly patriarchal.”.

There are some very comic touches. For instance, “ The first time he was called a dirty Paki parent…. by a teenager who had just tried to buy a pornographic magazine.”

His way of organising the chapters is not very clear. The reader is left confused once the character Arjan is introduced, as to how he fits into the story of the two sisters. Later on in the book this is clarified, but it is not clear as to what is the purpose of this mystery – does not add anything to the story and confuses the reader.

There is a lot of detail about the characters in the second part of the book but the story loses its momentum and there seems to be an attempt at trying to piece the story together, but not very successfully.

One person found this helpful

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Karen S.

Good read

Reviewed in Germany on May 5, 2021

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Love his books

Saima

loved it!

Reviewed in Australia on April 25, 2023

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Beautifully written, I could relate so well with the dynamics within the family struggling as migrants and yet how the individuals were more dimensional than what might have been apparent from the initial impression, the wider dynamics within the Sikh migrant community (this may well have been the Muslim community really) and of course the protagonist’s monologue was delightfully relatable…… I could keep going on, but listening to Sanghera on the empire podcast I did expect nothing less impressive… thank you so much

Jon McKnight

The Man With The Top-Notch Novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2013

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SATHNAM Sanghera, author of The Boy With The Top-Knot, has just become The Man With The Top-Notch Novel Under His Belt.

For his debut novel, Marriage Material, is an unputdownable and thoroughly rewarding read - and not just because it's the most accurate and interesting evocation of cornershop life since the TV sitcom Open All Hours.

Like most journalists who write novels, Sathnam majors on authenticity and credibility; although it's a work of fiction, everything in it feels like it did happen, or could have happened, and he never resorts to coincidence but supplies us instead with first-rate realism.

In some ways, the subject matter is bleak - cultural in-fighting, control-freak families, and racism - but Sathnam presents it to us so engagingly, so engrossingly, that we can't stop turning the pages.

It's ostensibly a tale about a Sikh family running a cornershop in Wolverhampton, set partly in the present and partly in the Sixties and Seventies when Enoch Powell's Rivers Of Blood speech set the cat among the pigeons in a country that was largely, to our retrospective shame and embarrassment, deeply and openly racist.

The Sikh culture doesn't come out of it terribly well, but neither does the dominant and intolerant white culture of the time.

And should anyone misguidedly use this book (or The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir Of Love, Secrets And Lies In Wolverhampton by Sanghera, Sathnam (2009) ) as a stick to beat the Sikh culture with, they might be well advised to look in the mirror and examine their own culture's shortcomings first.

Take arranged marriages and obsession with money, for instance. Sikhs and other British Indians may be criticised by some on both counts, but if you took arranged marriages and enquiries about how many pounds a year a potential suitor makes out of Jane Austen's novels, she'd have had precious little left to write about for her mostly white English audience of the time.

And before anyone scoffs at the characters in Sathnam's novel for hating each other and worse because they're from different castes, take a look at the white British bigots in Northern Ireland who behave exactly the same in the 21st Century and still have to live either side of so-called Peace Walls to stop them beating the Hell out of each other in the name of the same forgiveness-preaching God that they both claim to believe in.

Although Sathnam doesn't quote it in this novel, I couldn't help thinking of Gandhi's reaction when he was asked what he thought of English civilisation.

"It would be a very good idea," he said.

That aside, the novel is a lid-lifter on what it was like - and is like - to be a British Sikh. In much the same way that Goodness, Gracious Me! transformed the image of British Asians and made national treasures of Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia, this novel and Top-Knot are seminal works that will change anyone who reads them.

But that risks making the novel sound like it belongs on the Worthy But Dull shelf. It's anything but!

Sanghera's characters are lovable and loathable, engaging and infuriating, and, most importantly, we can't help caring about them.

The central character deserves a sequel or two, just as David Nobbs did with Henry Pratt, and Sathnam must surely have enough material to go the distance.

This novel is beautifully and intelligently written, witty and thought-provoking, and I can't wait to see what Sathnam does for an encore.

10 people found this helpful

Mrs S J Harding

Entertaining and insightful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2022

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Singhera provides another entertaining and heartbreaking insight into life as a Sikh, trying to cross the cultural divide. As a white Wulfunian, who lived with an Indian corner shop 4 doors down, I was really educated about prejudices on both sides, cultural barriers to understanding and integration, and the issues facing Sikh women trying to find a place in modern British society. This all sounds very serious, but the writing is witty and fast-paced, providing an amusingly cynical take on the viewpoints of all concerned.

2 people found this helpful

John W

Simply Superb. Read this book. After years of not reading, having been jaded by novels, this has made me read again.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 11, 2013

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(I've never done a book review before. Done lots of holiday reviews on Trip Adviser - so I'm not sure if this is the same and how you do it. I've deliberately not read any other reviews on "Marriage Material". What I'm about to say may not even count as a review. It's more a recall of my reading experience.)

I heard Sathnam on Radio 4's "Open Book". Whilst the interviewer, Mariella Frostrop, who has dodgy credentials (witness her recent tacky C4 programme "Sex Box"), the author Sathnam Sanghera came over as a class act. I liked what he said and how he said it. So, I wanted to know more.

Having been an avid reader, until about 10 years ago, I finally gave up reading novels. Changes in my life maybe. I had previously got into contemporary American writers but suddenly I couldn't read anything anymore.( I'd been reading everything from John Irving, to Daniel Woodrell and most stuff in between - including Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper too!) I guess I'd got to the stage that reading them lying on the beach, a few too many vinos down my throat, I'd read the words but nothing registered. So, in the intervening ten years I've only read a few biographies. Well two - about Brigitte Bardot! But that's another story.

So, ashamed of my recent behaviour, Sathnam Sanghera on Radio 4 seemed like someone worthy to try to rehabilitate me. And, God, was I pleased I tried. And so right too. He is fantastic. Read, read, read!

At the same time on Radio 4, I also heard in passing about his earlier biography "The Boy with the Topknot" as well as his current novel "Marriage Material". So I ordered both. Amazon delivered the latter novel (MM) first. Immediately I was captured. I read it in 24 hours - which is a record for me. I don't have all the fancy words and phrases that the posh book reviewers have. But it is just superbly written. He immediately drew you into this world of being Sikh in the UK ,young and old, (Midlands Wolverhampton)and what happened through three generations from the 60s until now; all that was going on then and how imperceptively we ended up where we are now. It's not just between the whites (goras) and the "Pakis". It's also about how society (accepting that there is such a thing) and the class structure generally has changed in a period of de-industrialisation in the Midlands and yuppi-fication in the south and how it spread. But before you yawn, it's not some Guardian reader's smug tome. It's vibrant and witty; superbly crafted and absolutely not over-written in some "clever-clogs / look at me and how clever I am" way. It's about all the changes that happened for people, particularly Asian Sikhs reconciling their past and their present and what that means. You don't have to be a Brummie Asian to read this and make sense of this. You can live in Weybridge or the Outer Hebrides and relate to this and love it; and get something.

I was just totally fascinated, enthralled and moved by the descriptions of the struggle; the daily family toil; the loyalty; the sense of duty and what happened through these changing times; what some could accept and others could not; of the duty to parents, culture versus religion versus the need to move on. And in the end that love (not duty) mattered. It also made me really think about me as a "gora" and how some of them behaved - both good and bad. (Look it up for the meaning.) Sure, there are some great plot twists that leave you wanting to turn the pages. It's a novel after all. There has to be. But in the end, you feel.... well - that's up to you. But I know how I felt. I defy you not to feel something.

Towards the very, very end,I suppose,(being a novel and with my previous American novel exposure)I thought it was in danger of going a bit "John Irving". But so what!Like all good novels, it has to have a sort of "pulling together". (But I don't think there's a real end - there's a follow-up in there somewhere, Santhnam!)

Read this book. Sathnam inspired me to read again - and that's saying something. And get his "Boy with A Topknot" at the same time. I'm not sure which order to read them. But,probably like me, read the "Marriage Material" novel first. Then you'll recognise stuff when you read the earlier memoir. (Search for the cross-overs: I love the Esso "crystal glasses!)

P.S Just so everyone knows, I sent an email to Sathnam and got a lovely reply. Sathnam: I know you're a journalist and writer. I'm not. But your novel is just great. You got me reading again and made me think further about my own circumstances. Thanks for that. Just one day later I got your "Boy with the Topknot" - your earlier biography. Again I read it in 24 hours. That one made me cry. You can guess why. Just a fantastic read. J,

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