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Mr Sidhu’s Post Office author: “I’m a firm believer that the old things are the good things”

His late father’s values as a subpostmaster and the Post Office scandal become entwined in the debut novel of Amman Brar.

Shyamantha Asokan

Published: Monday, 10 August 2026 at 5:00 pm

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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

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“I’m a firm believer that the old things are the good things,” Amman Brar tells me. His debut novel, Mr Sidhu’s Post Office, is inspired by his father, who was a subpostmaster in Richmond-upon-Thames by way of a rural Punjabi village. “The things that have lasted thousands of years are probably good; there’s a reason they’ve lasted that long. There are plenty of bad things too, of course, but some principles have been hard-won over time by the human race. Mr Sidhu’s values are those of my dad and his mates and his brothers.

“My father passed away eight years ago,” he sighs, “and my daughter’s just about to turn eight so she never met him. The impetus behind writing the book was to capture something of him to pass on to her, and it was lovely to write because it was like hanging out with my dad again, or a version of him. It took me a bit longer to write than it needed to because I knew when I finished writing, that would be over.”

Those “bad things” Brar mentions are, in this case, the Post Office Horizon scandal, a secondary source of inspiration for the novel (which is Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime for the next two weeks). The challenge for Brar was to take this episode in recent history – the wrongful prosecutions for fraud, the fractured families and corrosive horror – and restore some humanity to its victims.

The Brars were friends with some of them, and horrified to hear what they’d been through. “It was a nightmare, it was real gaslighting. I incessantly watched the human impact statements, which are still available online. Postmaster after postmaster came to tell their story about what happened to them, how awful it was – and it was a world I’d grown up in so I knew exactly what it meant.

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“I’m very much a ‘glass half full’ person. I wanted to show you can stand firm when things are going bad: keep hold of your principles and things that are important to you. Otherwise, we all can just sway this way and that in the world, especially these days with all the distractions. The news is relentless and you get these snippets of snippets, which is why it was important to me to write a long-form immersive account – it’s very much about one character.

“I wanted to say that these people are not defined by the scandal. They had dreams, they had lives. They were in their communities. I didn’t want to define them solely by their trauma. That’s something they had to deal with, but what’s more important is how they come out of that. How can you keep hold of what’s true for you, what’s important to you? Those are the things no-one tells you about. How do you not just give up?”

We stick closely to Mr Sidhu – variously addressed as Sukhdev, David, Dave, Davey, Suki, Siddhu, and Sid, depending on the company – as he navigates colliding cultures and the stubborn generation gap. A dutiful, gentle soul committed to the people he serves, it’s hard not to root for a man who arrived in England with £3 in his pocket and the determination that “the one thing he never wanted to be in his life: useless”.

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Brar ably captures the absurd, maddening computer-says-no aspect of contemporary life and what happens when we mortgage our humanity to corporations and tech. “Everything is so online. Everyone’s just staying at home. They don’t have to go anywhere or see anyone. It’s bad for communities – people need to be around people. It’s just not right.” But ultimately he brings light and redemption to his characters, never losing sight of the most profound, eternal things that bind us – chief among them, how we like our tea.

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office is a tender, soulful book brimming with love. A burgeoning romance between Mr Sidhu and his employee Rose is the pulse of the story, but love suffuses every page. It’s in the compassion and small kindnesses Mr Sidhu shows his customers even in the face of racist thuggery. It’s in the way he subs bereaved mum Rita out of his own pocket when she gets the Post Office opening times wrong, protects vulnerable pensioner Min from scammers, and employs amicable Scottish drunk Bill when he’s down on his luck.

It’s in the friction and forgiveness between Mr Sidhu and his children, and his unyielding faith in Rose’s son, Jay. But most movingly and simply of all, it’s in a grateful son writing a book to honour to his father.

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