Review: Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera

 Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy with the Topknot, his memoir of growing up Sikh in Wolverhampton, dealt not only with the retro ephemera of an Eighties childhood but also with the serious subject of mental illness. His follow-up, as the title suggests, moves to the next age of a man’s life. 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.”