Customer Reviews

Marriage Material

A wonderfully written story of three generations of a Wolverhampton Sikh family, Marriage Material is first and foremost a hugely enjoyable novel. Spanning almost half a century, it is a story of politics, race, identity and, at the heart of it all, family. Having escaped from the family run Bains Stores, Arjan has moved to London, is working as a graphic designer and become engaged - to a white woman. However, the death of his father obliges him to return to the family business to help his mother - a temporary arrangement with no exit plan. Alternating between the 1960s and the present day, the story unfolds to explore the conflicts within and between families, communities and generations.

This is a stunning novel, in turns gripping, sad, funny and as the final truth is revealed, shocking. Marriage Material is a portrait of a time and a place, and a study of community and family and their power to divide and eventually, to unite. Told throughout with warmth, humour and an authenticity that reflects the author's own family background, I'd thoroughly recommend it.

For quite a few years now I've known Sathnam Sanghera as an always-interesting newspaper columnist and although I knew he'd written a couple of books,they didn't really grab my attention until Marriage Material came along this month. I got hold of a copy and I thought it was so good I finished it over the weekend. It's witty book, describing the lives of a Sikh family in the insalubrious city of Wolverhampton, and is full of insights into life in an immigrant community.

The story is told by Arjan Banga, a young Sikh whose grand-father came to England in 1955 with just a shilling in his pocket. With high hopes for a decent career, "Mr Bains" ends up in retail by buying a shop in the insalubrious city of Wolverhampton. By 1968 when the book opens, Mr Bains' shop is fairly successful, but at great personal cost to himself for he is now confined to bed with a variety of ailments, while his wife and two daughters run the shop.

The older generation of Sikh's like Mr Bains have to struggle with their children's' desires to get out of retail and do something more profitable. His growing girls seem to have ambitions for education while all around him Sikh boys go off to London to work in graphic design and I.T and horror of horrors, enter into mixed marriages with white English girls. Those who remain in the retail trade are a different breed, abandoning the old ways in favour of rap music, dope and souped-up cars. In Marriage Material, Sanghera deals with all these issues with a mixture of wit and pathos, illustrating the dilemmas of an immigrant community as he takes us through this family saga.

Mr Bains eventually dies and his younger wife takes up the management of the store on her own. Grandson Arjan, who has a successful career in London feels the pull of family loyalty and threatens his relationship with white English Freya as he goes back at weekends to help get the shop onto an even keel. He finds himself almost overwhelmed by the staggeringly long hours and the mind-numbing boredom of sitting around waiting for customer, while long-suffering Freya shows starts to lose interest in coping with a Sikh boyfriend whose extended family seem to come higher up the priority list than she does.

As I read the book I learned much about the low-level racial abuse which passes across the counters of these shops on a daily basis. The Sikh shop-workers let it all pass over them but it must be wearing, particularly for Sikh's to be branded as potential terrorists and to have "Taleban Paedo" painted graffiti-style on their shop windows. Sathnam Sanghera has a wry sense of humour and a great sense of irony which enables him to contrast the quiet dignity of the shop workers with the ignorance of the shop's customers as they buy their daily supply of obesity-provoking sweets and drinks.

Marriage Material is a very good read. It's essentially the story of a family but the setting and the culture makes it an eye-opener to anyone who ever wonders what goes on in the rooms above the local "all-day shop". Sathnam Sanghera is an accomplished writer who has turned his skills as a reporter to good effect in this fine novel.

I was lucky enough to receive a preview copy of Sathnam Sanghera's debut novel, Marriage Material, finished it in two days and immediately started it over again.

It's a wonderful story: comic and poignant, layered and finely wrought, revealing Sanghera to be as at home in invented lands as in first person journalism and reportage.

In Marriage Material, Sanghera revisits many of the big themes of his compelling family memoir, The Boy with the Topknot: immigration, mixed-race relationships, the complex ties and tensions within families and the warmly drawn eccentricities of the British Sikh community. The corner shop setting is captured in all its tedium and minutiae, a cleverly chosen meeting place at once recognizably English and Indian that grounds the book in a humble realism.

I was intrigued by Sanghera's decision to rework the plot of Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, which becomes a kind of sister book to a story of sisterhood.

The borrowed narrative forms another strand in the novel's fascination with interlinking histories, the late Victorian institutions and characters of Bennett's masterpiece audaciously time-travelled to the immigrant's Wolverhampton of the mid-20th century and later.

Sanghera clearly has huge affection for all his characters, but, as with his mother in The Boy with the Topknot, he reserves his deepest pathos for women. The tenderness with which he draws the character of aunt Surinder, whose mixed-race elopement provides the catalyst for much of the action later on, remained with me long after I finished the book.

I can only heartily echo the comments of other 5-star reviewers about this book. I agree with all the praise they have for it for the same multitude of reasons. Sathnam Sanghera is in my view an incredibly talented and versatile writer who draws on his own fascinating experience to produce both non-fiction and, now, fiction, that is engaging, moving, educational and often hilarious. I loved this book and will be recommending it.

This novel is a beautiful story and very touching.
I have already bought it as a gift for several friends.

The story resonates and rarely do you feel such empathy with the main protagonists when they live a life so far removed from your own.

It was incredibly meaningful with an unexpected drama at the end.

Historical elements were interweaved so cleverly. I learnt alot that i am embarrassed to say i didn't already know.

I loved this novel - well done Sathnam Sanghera for providing such insight in such entertaining form.

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.

Marriage Material revisits many of the themes of The Boy With the Topknot: family, culture, religion, clashes between generations, immigration and racial tensions. Alternately touching and humorous, it conveys the necessary information for non-Sikhs to understand cultural references easily. I got a real sense of the claustrophobia of small shop life, and of being the only Asian in a school class otherwise composed of white boys. Highly recommended.

God this book resonated with me so much...would recommend it to anyone who grew up as an immigrant kid in 70s and 80s Britain.
Beautifully written, gripping, poignant and hilarious.

Being a British Punjabi female I related to this novel. On occasions I laughed out loud, on other occasions it was very poignant. I love the stuff about the sneezing. It is so refreshing to know that those in mixed marriages are not alone. Sathnam is in touch with the reality of Asian immigrants and the experience of their off spring, born and raised in the UK.
My partner, Stewart (not his real name!) couldn't put the book down. Highly recommended.

(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,