Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office, by Amman Brar (Juniper/HarperCollins Publishers)

In 1999 the British Post Office introduced computer terminals into local post offices. Most villages and areas had a post office, but they were different from the post offices South Africans were used to.

They were often in a small local shop which sold basic groceries, with the sub-postmaster in his or her own little cubicle.

The computer system introduced was known as Horizon, and the Japanese company behind it was Fujitsu, a major global technology and IT services company.

From the beginning there were accounting problems, which escalated to alarming levels. According to Wikipedia, between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data.

“Other sub-postmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least 13 suicides.”

In 2024 UK prime minister Rishi Sunak described it all as “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history”.

In his author’s note in this novel, Amman Brar says he had always wanted to write about the sub-post office – ie not the main post office – his father ran in London’s Richmond in the 1980s and 1990s.

This was “partly an attempt to capture the journey my father made from humble beginnings in India to serving an adopted community on the other side of the world”.

But as Brar started to research his subject he came across the IT Horizon scandal. The first most Britons heard of it was in the award-winning ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024. Despite this, Brar says, it had been reported repeatedly in the press since 2009, but few had noticed.

Brar realised he could not write a novel, based on his father’s experience, without incorporating the Horizon scandal, and so here it is, the story of an elderly Punjabi-born Sikh who has a sub-post office in Richmond.

Sukhdev Sidhu, known as David in England, grows up on a small farm in the Punjab. His two older brothers are illiterate, hard-working farmer’s sons, but Sukhdev is not like them, and his father sends him to school.

He eventually becomes a maths teacher, and with his father’s help – which earns his brothers’ resentment – he emigrates to England.

There he eventually gets the sub-postmastership in Richmond, assisted by his beloved wife Sarabjit, who runs the shop. They have two children, a girl and a boy, but after his wife dies Sukhdev becomes increasingly bewildered by his now grown-up progeny. The daughter has an English fiancé, but there seem to be no marriage plans, and the son is an actor – ie a man without a proper job.

Sukhdev misses his wife desperately; she knew how to handle the children.

But life goes on, and kindly Mr Sidhu becomes a pillar of the community. There is Min, who is losing her marbles, and whom Mr Sidhu protects by keeping her pension book in his post office safe and making small payments to the pub to cover her bar bills.

There is the harassed young mother who comes into the shop when the post office is officially closed to cash her welfare cheque, and whom Mr Sidhu pays from the shop’s till, knowing he can recover the money in the morning when the time-operated safe re-opens.

There are others who want stamps after post-office closing, so Mr Didhu keeps some in the shop’s till.

None of this helopful community work works in Mr Sidhu’s favour when the post office auditors come.

Despite 20 years of meticulously accurate account-keeping, when the computer comes Mr Sidhu suddenly begins to make unexplained losses of a thousand pounds a month.

This distresses Mr Sidhu enormously, and he checks and rechecks his figures, but every month another thousand pounds has disappeared. The auditors arrive when he is officially 35 thousand pounds short.

Life is not all bad – Mr Sidhu has come to have feelings for Rose, the middle-aged Englishwoman who runs the shop, but despite goodwill on both sides, negotiating a cross-cultural relationship is not always easy.

What will happen to Mr Sidhu, the kindest and most upright of men, as the lawyers circle? All he has to do, the auditors tell him, is make good the losses and all will be well. But every month another thousand pounds is missing.

Who has access to the post office keys, both the auditors and Mr Sidhu’s children want to know. Could it be Rose’s unconventional son?

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office is the story of a good and kindly man caught up in a system he cannot understand. Will he win through? In real life we know from the media the Horizon scandal has been resolved, and that compensation is being paid, but will it all come in time for Mr Sidhu? And will his hopes and dreams be rewarded?

This is a wonderful book, but also one describing an egregious failure, and the horror faced by one good man – and many others – coming up against a faulty system, and being assured by the suits they were the only ones with the problem. It must have been a nightmare.