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.
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.
*Sunday Times*
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.
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.
*Sunday Telegraph*
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.
*Daily Mail*
Smart, funny and melancholic, Sanghera's debut novel goes straight
to the heart of family life
*Marie Claire*
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.
*Spectator*
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.
*Observer*
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.
*Independent*
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
*Psychologies*
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.
*Scotsman*
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
*Harper's Bazaar - 5 Books for the Autumn*
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.
*Stylist*
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.
*Financial Times*
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.
*The Economist*
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