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Written by Philip Hensher

• Format: Hardcover, 608 pages
• Publisher: Knopf
• On Sale: October 22, 2008
• Price: $26.95
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4448-1 (1-4000-4448-0)

about this book

From the author of The Mulberry Empire: a new novel of great dramatic and emotional depth—a sweeping, powerfully engaging story of ordinary lives that are profoundly shaped by the larger forces of history.

In 1974, the Sellers are transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will be felt for years as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover—set off by two seemingly inconsequential but ultimately indelible acts of cruelty—that will erupt, full-blown, decades later.

These lives unfold against a brilliantly rendered backdrop of twentieth-century English history at the dawn of the Thatcher era: prosperity for some and disenfranchisement for others, which will have a drastic impact on both families.

Expansive and deeply felt, The Northern Clemency shows Philip Hensher to be one of our most masterly chroniclers of English life, and a storyteller of virtuosic gifts.

“Anyone who thinks that the English novel has lost its ability to inhabit sprawling, meaty tomes, as in the days of yore, might want to take note of The Northern Clemency. For Philip Hensher has produced a work of fiction that is the antithesis of so many fashionable contemporary novels, with their elliptical ironies and screenplay-ready dialogue. The Northern Clemency is a richly textured, closely observed saga . . . Hensher provides plenty of action, but he embeds it in the atmosphere and rhythms of quotidian existence. There is an aspect of social history to the novel that reminds one of Mrs. Gaskell or even Dickens . . . His eye for detail is precise and his touch sure . . . Searing.” — Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal

“The very specificity of the details makes Hensher’s suburbia seem all the more universal, an archetypal field of dreams . . . American writers tend to approach suburban life with either savage ridicule or stricken solemnity, so Hensher’s humanism, equal parts humor and sympathy, feels especially welcome. Reading it is a bit like wandering through your old neighborhood, listening in on the thoughts of the residents in each house, finally able to apprehend the hilarious, pitiful and miraculous expanse of it all.” —Laura Miller, Salon.com (Book Awards 2008, Ten Best)

“Relentlessly enveloping . . . The Northern Clemency is a haunting, loving novel about two families in Sheffield, England, over the course of two politically fraught decades . . . Why was it one of the most plausible nominees for this year’s Man Booker Prize (and arguably a much better choice than The White Tiger, this year’s flashy winner)? Why is it the best book of 2008, according to the editors of Amazon.com? The answer hides in plain sight. This is a book that can artfully encapsulate the whole state of the Glover family in a single unappetizing culinary image . . . The Northern Clemency creates a piercingly insightful group portrait. There is dazzling hyperrealism in Hensher’s descriptive powers . . . Hensher is apt to be an instant hit with American audiences.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Readers 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 . . . A richly rewarding read.” —Keir Graff, Booklist

“A full-to-bursting drama of family and place . . . The dialogue is spot-on.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Philip Hensher’s new book shows that the epic, exciting, deeply engaged novel of society is not dead in England. The book has all the blessings of art, with the pulse of what Henry James called ‘felt life’ at the centre of its moral adventures.” —Andrew O’Hagan, author of Our Fathers

“This is the most absorbing and enjoyable novel I’ve read since the heyday of A.S. Byatt . . . Such is Hensher’s wit and humanity and so rich in detail is his crowded canvas, we soon realize that the novel is indeed a modern epic . . . You won’t want to skip a single sentence. It strides along, packed with cherishable observations.” —Roger Lewis, Sunday Express

“A pin-sharp portrait . . Characters are warmly and sympathetically drawn.” —Mail on Sunday

“Combining his intelligence with 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 . . . As clever and as elegant as Hensher’s previous books.” —Mark Lawson, Esquire

“The Northern Clemency makes a virtue of its exactness . . . The politics are never overplayed . . . Extraordinarily charged and vivid.”—DJ Taylor, Independent on Sunday

“In 2003, Granta magazine included Hensher on their sometimes prescient list of ‘Best Young British Novelists’ along with the now famous Monica Ali and Zadie Smith. The Northern Clemency thoroughly justifies his place in that Olympian group . . . Hensher’s intricately crafted sentences flash with wit, his dexterity with telling detail is captivating, and his dialogue delivers the guilty pleasure of eavesdropping. If you give yourself over to this novel’s organic movement, you’ll fall in love with its startlingly perceptive depiction of these people. And you’ll enjoy the satisfaction of seeing how these disparate scenes lock into each other in the most poignant ways . . . This absorbing portrait of a large group of people invites comparison to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, but Hensher is a gentler satirist and treats his characters more tenderly. Indeed, he writes with such illuminating attention to the flutterings of everyday hope and despair that you come away from these pages feeling like a more insightful person. That’s all we ask from the best books of the year.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World

“The Northern Clemency is a tremendous book . . . Philip Hensher has composed not so much a condition-of-England as a condition-of-humanity novel, which is gripping and surprising and shocking in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and enormously wide in psychological and moral scope. What a writer he is!”—Philip Pullman

“While the book, on its surface, appears to be an old-fashioned novel–symphonic in scale, almost Victorian in its dense detail–it also recalls the experiments of Virginia Woolf (especially The Years) with its multiple leaps in time and shifts in point of view . . . It creates, with sumptuous thoroughness, a whole world.” —Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

“Brilliantly styled . . . The book describes the heart-breaking rhythms of family life as it occurs over decades. This domestic action plays out against the backdrop of a hectically changing Britain. Hensher is fascinatingly good on how social transformation manifests itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture . . . The Northern Clemency is not only extremely funny, but also deeply humane. [It] is a virtuoso display of sympathy: Hensher seems to dwell as easily and evocatively in the mind-world of a 10-year-old schoolboy as in that of a 59-year-old stroke victim or a middle-aged estate agent.”—Robert MacFarlane, Sunday Times

“A remarkable novel . . . Though it is as emotionally engaged as political satire and as compulsively readable as a saga it resembles neither but takes its own idiosyncratic line . . . Hensher’s technique of shifting continually from voice to voice gives a cumulative effect of luminous richness, like a perfect piece of orchestration. He excels at dialogue . . . But while his technical virtuosity is remarkable and his ability to conjure anything from a front room to an entire era equally striking, something more than brilliant cleverness makes this novel extraordinary . . . At the heart of the elegant narrative architecture, the fine comic timing and exuberant detail, there flickers a sense that generosity, a sense of others, is the best we can do. And at the last, in a twist as shocking as tragedy, that modest hope is beautifully fulfilled . . . Dazzling.”—Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

“An engrossing and hugely impressive novel . . . Hensher is a brilliant anatomist of familial tension 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.”—Paul Batchelor, The Times

“The Northern Clemency is a terrific novel–a truly fine achievement . . . A good old-fashioned story about two families, beginning in 1974 and spanning 20 years . . . It is a tribute to Hensher’s powers of invention that this saga becomes so involving that no detail is too small. And Hensher is at his brilliant best in the details.”—Cressida Connolly, New Statesman

“An early contender for novel of the year . . . Hensher presents the great drama and inexhaustible wonder of ordinary life . . . The novel is beautifully organised at three levels–close up, at the level of the sentence, further back, at the level of narrative progress, and then overall, as a fully realised whole–but its most impressive feature is that it manages to be a page-turner while eschewing the traditional devices we associate with such a book.”—Simon Baker, Spectator

“What is particularly enjoyable as the reader relaxes into this book is the portrayal of the complexity of family life: the layers, secrets and misunderstandings, the drama of different lives lived under the same roof, by people who are both strangers and kin . . . The novel provides an enjoyable nostalgia fest as well as an acute cultural history of provincial England . . . The battle between the police and the strikers as the ‘scabs’ try to enter the mine is a virtuoso set-piece, the atmosphere perfectly caught . . . Engrossing, amusing and moving.”—Lesley Glaister, Independent

“Beautifully written . . . 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 . . . The plot charges along and boasts some supremely assured dialogue . . . Occasionally earthy and always entertaining.”—Richard Bath, Scotland on Sunday

“Like life, The Northern Clemency consists of many overlapping, intersecting and interdependent smaller plots, which are both individually and collectively enthralling, sometimes sad, and often very funny . . . Hensher doesn’t labour the period detail, and the reader is soon absorbed into the everyday but engrossing lives of his characters.”—Thomas Jones, Daily Telegraph

“A fluent and immensely readable piece of work, sustained by a pleasure in its details . . . There is a timelessness about Hensher’s vision that is quite unusual these days, suggesting a quietly desperate but stable Englishness that carries on unchanged beneath a surface that is slowly becoming a little more glitzy, a little richer . . . Hensher’s strength is in the subtlety of his character development.”—Giles Newington, Irish Times

“Epic in scale . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly online (starred)