The Northern Clemency

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008.

An epic chronicle of the last twenty years of British life from the Booker shortlisted 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 ten-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of fifteen-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.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

So the garden of number eighty-four is nothing more than a sort of playground for all the kids of the neighbourhood?" "I wouldn't say all," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. "I would have said it was only the Glovers' children." "All of them?" Mrs. Warner--Karen, now--said. "The girl seems so quiet. It's the elder boy, really." "I've seen the girl going in there too," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. "It's during the day with her. She's on her own generally. I grant you, it's the older boy who goes in after dark, and he's got people with him. Girls, one at a time. There'll be trouble with both those boys." "But, Mrs. . . ." Mr. Warner said. He was slow to catch people's names. "Call me Anthea," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. "Now that we've finally met." "I mean, Anthea," Mr. Warner said, "why doesn't anyone tell the parents? They surely can't know." "That I don't understand," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. She was stately, forty-six, divorced, at number ninety-three, almost opposite the empty house. "This isn't the best opportunity, I dare say." They were at the Glovers'. It was a party; the neighbourhood had been invited. Most had been puzzled by the invitation, knowing the couple and their three children only by sight. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Warner had passed the time of day on occasion. They had arrived more or less at the same time; both had the habit, at a party, of moving swiftly to the back wall the better to watch arrivals. They had made common ground, and Mrs. Warner's husband had been introduced. He worked for the local council in a position of some authority. It was a Friday night in August. The room was filling up, in a slightly bemused way; the neighbours, nervously boastful, were exchanging compliments about each other's gardens; conver?sations about motor-cars were running their usual course. "It's a nice thing for her to do," Mrs. Warner said, who always prided herself on thinking the best of others. She had left her son, nineteen, a worry, at home; she thought the party might have been smarter than it was, not knowing the Glovers. Other people's children had come. "She's a nice woman, I believe," Mrs. Arbuthnot said, who had her own private names for almost everyone in the room, the Warners, the Glovers included. "It's a shame she couldn't have waited a week or two, though." "Yes?" Mr. Warner said, who believed that if a thing could be done today, it shouldn't be put off until tomorrow. "There's new people moving into number eighty-four," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. "It might have been nice to introduce them to everyone. They're moving in next week." "Just opposite Anthea's," Mrs. Warner explained to her husband. "Perhaps it wasn't ideal," Mr. Warner said. "From the point of view of dates." "People are busy in August, these days," Mrs. Arbuthnot said. "They go away, don't they?" "We were thinking about the Algarve," Mrs. Warner said. "Oh, the Algarve," Mrs. Arbuthnot said, encouraging and patronizing as a magazine. It was a good party, like other parties. Mrs. Glover was in a long dress: pale blue and high at the neck, it clung to her; on it were printed the names of capital cities. In vain, Mrs. Warner ran her eyes over it, looking for the name of the Algarve, but it was not there. "Nibble?" Mrs. Glover said, frankly holding out a potato wrapped in foil, spiked with miniature assemblages of cheese and pineapple, wee Excerpted from The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

On the day in 1974 that the Sellers family moves from suburban London to their new home in Sheffield, chaos reigns across the street at the Glovers'. Father Malcolm has decamped in the wake of his wife Katherine's affair with the owner of the dodgy flower shop where she works as an assistant; Katherine, after a sleepless night, has a savage reaction to the discovery of a pet snake her youngest son, Tim, has been hiding in his bedroom. In spite of the drama of their first encounter, Alice Sellers and Katherine Glover eventually bond over tea and biscuits, sharing concern over their oddball sons and an interest in the external events that consume their lives over the next 30 years, particularly Margaret Thatcher's decision to close the mines. Don't be put off by the length of this shimmering, generously paced novel, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Hensher (Kitchen Venom; The Mulberry Empire) offers a deeply pleasurable read whose sympathetic characters will remain with you long after the last page is turned. Highly recommended.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, Hensher's Sheffield-set suburban drama spans 20 years in the lives of two neighboring families: the Sellers and the Glovers. Katherine Glover's husband, Malcolm, assuming Katherine has been cheating on him, disappears the night before the Sellers arrive in Sheffield. Katherine confides her troubles in her new neighbor, Alice Sellers, and Malcolm quickly returns. Alice's daughter, Sandra, meanwhile, forms unlikely relationships with Katherine's two sons: one a friendship and one a doomed unrequited love sparked by a thoughtless act between two children. Epic in scale but more modest in its focus, Hensher presents a trove of insular, often obsessive characters; the narrative's wide-ranging perspective shifts between the minds of not only the Glovers and Sellers but also their neighbors, classmates and assorted others. Margaret Thatcher's impact comes to the fore during the miner's strike of 1984 and the subsequent privatization of the industry, but the novel's focus remains on domestic drama: the unease and desperation of adolescence, and the seemingly unbridgeable distances between parents, children, siblings and spouses. (Nov.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Booklist Review

Hensher's sixth novel was shortlisted for, but did not win, the Man Booker Prize. With a time line starting in 1974, it's also the sort of novel that, in the 1970s, would have had a better chance of winning. A tale of two neighboring Sheffield families, one locally established, one newly arrived from London, it's old-fashioned in its pace and attention to daily life and has a length that may deter time-starved contemporary readers. Its subject matter is quintessentially English and closely observed: the stifling gaze of the neighbors; the unspoken dialogue of long-marrieds; the agonizing explorations of adolescence; all of it conveying the sense of surprise we feel when we realize that this is, after all, what we have become. Readers not daunted by this book's heft will be rewarded by poetic prose and astonishingly lifelike character sketches, by Hensher's sly wit, and, above all, by a moving sense of life, faithfully re-created, its most humble conflicts treated with utmost respect. American readers, too, will gain a keen sense of the way things were over there back then. A richly rewarding read.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Full-to-bursting drama of family and place from Hensher (The Fit, 2005, etc.), a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. Transplanted from swinging London to South Yorkshire, the Sellers clan winds up on a suburban street among contractors, shopkeepers, housewives and disaffected teenagersit's 1974, and disaffection is thick in the air. Shy, musical Francis and sister Sandra, a touch on the wild side, meet up with the Glover kids: bookish Jane ("Under no circumstances would she tell any of these people that she, Jane, was writing a novel"); Daniel, busily daydreaming of sex with anything animate; and Tim, devoted to snakes and deeply troubled. The families do what families do on that leafy street beneath the blue suburban skies, and, given that there is no childhood without trauma, traumas ensue. Fast-forward a decade, with the good children in university and beginning careers. Family life is disintegrating as jobs at the colliery dry up and the me-first, new-economy society emerges with all the old-class assumptions intact. Then fast-forward to the '90s, with the kids leading lives of quiet desperation. Scattered around the world, they are always pulled back to the moors and hills. While not much is done, a lot is talked aboutand the dialogue is spot on. Hensher's saga of 19th-century proportions is worth reading, even if the plot plods from time to time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.