Book description
An epic chronicle of the last 20 years of British life from the Booker
longlisted and Granta Best of Young British novelist, Philip Hensher.
Beginning in 1974 and ending with the fading of Thatcher's government
in 1996, 'The Northern Clemency' is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of an
entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people and
history on the move.
Set in Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two families:
Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children; and their
neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London so that Bernie
can pursue his job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move
in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home,
convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture
will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in
particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a
moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of
15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head
twenty years later. In the background, England is changing: from a
manufacturing and industrial based economy into a new world of shops,
restaurants and service industries, a shift particularly marked in the
North with the miners' strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on
both families.
Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great
nineteenth-century Russian novels, 'The Northern Clemency' shows Philip
Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life.
'Hensher is an anatomist of familial tensions and marshals his large
cast of characters deftly. He has an impeccable eye for nuances of
character and setting, and the details of Seventies food and décor are
lovingly done: the mushroom vol-au-vents, the white wall units with
brown smoked glass…an engaging and hugely impressive novel.' The Times
'The Northern Clemency - vast, compendious, wearing its ambition like
an outsize boutonniere - makes a virtue of its exactness, its
recapitulative zeal, its absolute determination to jam everything in and
sit unshiftably on the lid.' Independent on Sunday
'Hensher has a forensic eye for detail, providing nightmarish glimpses
of the everyday…engrossing, amusing and moving.' Independent
'An epic novel.' Guardian
'Hensher is fascinating good on how social transformation manifests
itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture…extremely
funny, but also deeply humane.' The Sunday Times.
A remarkable novel…Hensher's technique of shifting continually from
voice to voice, the third-person narrative perceived from the viewpoint
of each character in turn, gives a cumulative effect of luminous
richness, like a perfect piece of orchestration…but there is something
more than brilliant cleverness that makes this novel extraordinary.'
Sunday Times
'Hensher's is a bold, impressively sustained attempt to mark a
transitional phase in modern Englishness as seen largely from the
domestic sphere.' TLS
'A beautifully written book…as impressive in its scope as in the
effortless artistry of the language. Its characters are well-defined and
plausible, while the narrative is leavened with deftly observed humour
that gently pokes its lower-middle class protagonists in the ribs.'
Scotland on Sunday Philip Hensher is a columnist for The Independent,
arts critic for The Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British
novelist. He has written five novels, 'Other Lulus', 'Kitchen Venom'
(Winner of the Somerset Maughn Award), 'Pleasured', the
Booker-longlisted 'The Mulberry Empire' and 'The Fit', as well as a
collection of short stories, 'The Bedroom of the Mister's House'. He
lives in South London.
