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.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'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 decor 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 The Northern Clemency is an immense novel which sweeps through 20 epochal years, showing us that a country can move rapidly into the future but that some individuals often remain shackled to the events of the past. In The Northern Clemency, an early contender for novel of the year, Philip Hensher looks in detail at a small group of people over a generation, and in doing so presents the great drama and inexhaustible wonder of ordinary life. Spectator 'The Northern Clemency is a terrific novel - a truly fine achievement.' Cressida Connolly, New Statesman 'As with most families, it's the small private moment that fascinate.' The London Paper 'Essential for anyone who wants to be ahead of the game by literary awards season.' Elle '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 The "state-of-the-nation" novel has made a return in recent years. This is the most interesting and accomplished of them that I've come across, precisely because it doesn't do the usual state-of-the-nation things. Hensher immaculately provides texture and atmosphere.' The Tablet 'An epic novel that spans 1974-1996. It's a laudable undertaking and Hensher is very good at describing a suburban 1970s childhood and adolescence.' Metro, Fiction of the Week 'An ambitious portrait of life in the north over three turbulent decades.' Observer 'Picks for 2008' 'Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.' Guardian 'Picks for 2008' 'Has the bones of a great British novel but, in practice, it is something more delicate -- a miniature made up of many moving parts, like an intricate piece of clockwork!What the book does very well is to capture individual scenes and a feeling of its time and place.' The Sunday Business Post 'Hensher has clearly been broadly influenced by Alan Hollinghurst's Man--Booker-winning The Line of Beauty but has written something distinctly his own. Combining his intelligence with a less expected humanity and storytelling drive, The Northern Clemency powerfully slices and preserves 20 years of British life and deserves to be remembered for at least that length of time.' Esquire 'In a pin--sharp portrait of Sheffield this reviewer knows well, Hensher charts the shifting fortunes of the Glovers and the Sellers as they negotiate the seismically changing decades of the late 20th century.' Daily Mail 'The big question: is this novel worth, at a minute a page, 12 hours of our time? I think it is.' Scotsman Praise for 'The Mulberry Empire': 'It's when he turns his pen to the more minute matters of the body and heart that Hensher changes from a merely clever writer into a moving one.' Ned Denny, Daily Mail 'Hensher is a publisher's dream. At last, he seems to have returned to the fictional territory of his earliest novel, trusting less to research than to his sharp wit, keen eye and love of London.' Patrick Gale, Independent 'Hensher is gifted with a great virtuosity and a relentless intelligence.' Ian Sansom, Guardian Praise for 'The Fit': 'A comedy of manners crammed with cleverness, warmth and genuinely funny jokes!Hensher is incapable of writing a dull sentence.' Daily Telegraph 'One of the funniest, most touching, most unexpected novels I've read for a long time.' Guardian 'In the best comic novel tradition, "The Fit" is also serious and touching!and like many of the best things in life it fell from a clear sky, and is all the more intriguing for that.' The Times 'A sharp novel, full of deft dialogue, ridiculous moments and enjoyable sallies.' Literary Review 'Playful, perceptive, and guaranteed to keep the reader's mind on its toes.' The Telegraph 'Genuinely beautiful.' The Spectator
About the Author
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.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
116 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A clever and engaging slog on ordinary life...,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Hardcover)
The story is set in Sheffield, an industrial city 200 miles outside of London. It is told over 3 decades (1970's to 90's) and is centered on 2 families who live opposite from each other on same street. Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their family (teenagers Daniel and Jane and 10 year told Tim) were all born and raised in Sheffield and are portrayed as a dysfunctional family. Malcolm works for a building society, gardens in their backyard in his spare time and partakes in civil war re-enactments. While his wife Katherine decides it's time to get out of the house and take a part time job in a new florist shop - where she eventually falls for the owner. Their oldest son Daniel is handsome and spends his time in pursuit of girls. Jane is bookish and dreams of being an author and writing poetry. While young Timothy has an obsession with Snakes. In contrast, the Sellers' family is comparatively normal and is adjusting to the move to the decaying city of Sheffield from London.
* The story is dense and thick on ordinary life. At 597 pages, this is not a breezy, page turning romp. Henser takes us inside the day-to-day life of each family and the relationship between the two families and their children. The book is dense with details of the daily lives of its characters - and it brings color to what goes on behind closed doors of the daily life of middle and working class Britons - - sharing marital problems - - teenagers going through adolescence - - neighbors trying to keep up to their neighbors - - families pretending everything is ok when reality is something altogether different - - gossip - - brutality of kids in school mistreating new kids and on and on. Normal, regular life - shared colorfully in minute detail and as some reviewers coin Henser's "forensic eye for detail and exactness." Here's an example: "Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt." * This book tests your reading muscles. The book is separated into 5 sections with the story jumping around between families and individuals and then jumping forward in time - not fully filling in what happened in the gaps but enough to keep you connected, fully engaged and turning the pages. * The story is deeply introspective and gets you in the mind of the principal characters. Hensher has piercing insights into his characters and how they get through and cope with the day-to-day struggles of life - you become part of the community and the character's individual lives - the secrets, the misunderstandings, the dramas - and you see that those that should be so close as kin are so far away from truly understanding each other. Here's a passage about Jane on a family trip to the country: "But Jane's pleasure was being ruined by the noises and silences in the car. Her father's concentration on the road had a different quality of silence to it, compared to Tim's dense, bewildered concentration, or the quiet amusement Daniel was extracting from the situation. She wondered what her owned pained silence sounded like from outside - perhaps very much like sulking." * The book is beautifully written sparking full spectrum of emotions within the detail of the hum drum lives - laughter, sadness, distress, frustration - among hundreds and hundreds of minute details - an insider's diary of people's lives jumping from one character to the next. The author's brilliance keeps you slogging through this slow moving muddy river chugging along at 15-20 pages at a crack then setting it down - taking a full 2 weeks to finish. The book closes with Daniel (now an adult) speaking to his wife - "What time is it?" Daniel said, then looked at his watch. "My God, I've been sitting here for three hours." "Did you drop off?" Helen (his wife) said. "Don't tell me off, I've got nothing much to do today anyway, said Daniel." "What are you reading?" Helen said coming over. "What's it about?" "Oh, I don't know," Daniel said. "It's sort of about people like us, I think." Yes, I too have been sitting for hours (and hours and hours) slowly turning the pages and reading a book about people just like us. I enjoyed the book. Put your hip-waders on and take a plunge through this clever, warm, amusing, every-day life swamp.
50 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ordinary life made extraordinary,
By
This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Hardcover)
Don't let some of the words used to describe "The Northern Clemency," words like "epic," "rambling," or "stream of consciousness," discourage you from taking up this wonderful novel. It is none of these things. Certainly it is the complicated and intricate story of two English families, a story that is set mostly, but not entirely, in Sheffield, and extends from the Thatcher years to a time not far from the present. The members of the two families, the Sellerses and the Glovers, total nine characters, each of whom is gradually but fully developed, so the novel does, at first, feel like a Russian novel, except that there is no handy list of characters inside the front cover for consultation.
So it's best to read this book when you have a little time, and slowly you'll be drawn in, until you can't put the book down. The novel does not ramble. It is intricately plotted, and even when it ranges as far abroad as Australia, its events seem natural and inevitable. As for "stream of consciousness," no, no, no. "Ulysses" it isn't---except in the sense that the writing is wonderful. In some ways, it will remind you of a John Updike novel in its evocation of the humble quotidian beauty of life in a suburb where people eat Coronation Chicken and fish pie, shop for groceries at the Gateway, and buy their children's school uniforms at Cole's. What's unusual about this novel is its sense of mystery. The two couples at the center of the novel, Katherine and Malcolm Glover and Alice and Bernie Sellers, have marriages that are complicated but somehow familiar in their arguments, joys, and disappointments. But who can account for the ways in which children spin away from their parents in ways unpredictable and strange? How do parents produce children whose only links to each other seem to be their last names and their DNA? It happens all the time, of course. With the phrase "So the garden" the ending of the novel circles back to its beginning. When I finished reading, I turned back to the opening pages, and in looking at the names of the characters, whose fate I now knew, I realized that I would read this book all over again.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A phenomenal novel,
By Nina (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Hardcover)
A fascinating and absolutely rivetting novel.
I finished The Northern Clemency 4 weeks ago and have been letting it sink in. It is a wonderfully resonant novel, and the people and places still live within my head. It is, for want of a better word, a 'family saga', following the lives of two Sheffield families from the 1970s to today but it is also much more than that. It creates an entire world with a 'cast of dozens', with some marvellous cameo chapters devoted to secondary figures who make the world come alive. It is terribly emotionally involving; it made me weep twice, and this is _because_ of its sparse language that allows the reader to fill in the gaps. The book threw me in and tumbled me about, lulled me into complacency and then hurled something unexpected at me. I loved the way we weave in and out of different people's consciousnesses, and i never quite knew where I was going to end up. The prose in this novel is to die for. Some favourite images include the phrase ' She looked at him, sharpening a pencil in her head' and, 'He danced, moving from one foot to the other and making vague clay-shaping motions with his hands.' I hope this gives you a tiny idea of the wonderfully assured mastery of this author. I knew I was in good hands from page 1, and I wasn't let down. I loved the build-up and the way people get mentioned on p.2 and then disappear from view until they unexpectedly reappear on p.64 in new, delightful combinations. I was entranced by the insight that suspense and surprise needn't come from the story itself but can come entirely from the plot, that is, from the way the story is presented. Unexpected revelations sneak up on you and give you delicious shivers of recognition. I absolutely loved it. I only wish there were additional amazon stars to mete out because this deserves 7 of them. It is truly outstanding. One of the best novels I have read ever. And I don't say this lightly. (I read a lot, and mostly so-called 'literary fiction'. To give you an idea of my taste: I love Jane Austen, Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy', Italo Calvino and David Mitchell.)
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
|
|
