Longlist of Booker Prize 2008
THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY
by PHILIP HENSHER
(click on cover for book detail)
RECENT REVIEWS
Philip Pullman
THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY is a tremendous book. Against an unfashionable 1970s background 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!
The Bookseller (Booksellers’ choice: Ruth Atkins, Borders)
Hensher’s style is fluid and engrossing.
The Bookseller (Booksellers’ choice: Rodney Troubridge, Waterstone’s)
This is a big novel packed full of good things.
The Times
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. An engrossing and hugely impressive novel.
The Independent
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… Hensher has a forensic eye for detail, providing nightmarish glimpses of the everyday… engrossing, amusing and moving.
The Sunday Telegraph
Emotionally engaged… compulsively readable.. 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…is 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 details, there flickers a sense…that generosity, a sense of others, is the best we can do. And at the last, in a tragedy as shocking as tragedy, that modest hope is beautifully fulfilled.
The Spectator
The Sunday Times
Hensher is fascinatingly good on how social transformation manifests itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture…He has witty fun with many of the signifiers of all this change. …THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY is not only extremely funny, but also deeply humane.
The Telegraph
The reader is soon absorbed into the everyday but engrossing lives of his characters…It consists of many overlapping, intersecting and interdependent smaller plots, which are both individually and collectively enthralling, sometimes sad and often very funny.
Esquire
THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY is as clever and as elegant as Hensher’s previous books…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.
The Observer
Absorbing.
The Guardian
Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.
Man Booker 2008 Longlist
Girl in a Blue Dress
by Gaynor Arnold
(click on cover for book detail)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff. She read English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she acted in many plays, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in the US. She has two grown up children and works for Birmingham’s Adoption and Fostering Service.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alfred Gibson’s funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. The Great Man’s will favours his children and a clandestine mistress over his estranged wife. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives, and she begins to examine her own life more closely.
Dorothea revisits their courtship, early days of nuptial pleasure and domestic family fun before the birth of too many children sapped her vitality. But she also uncovers the deviousness and frighteningly hypnotic power of this celebrity author. Now Dodo will need to face her grown-up children, and worse, her dual nemesis of ten years before, her redoubtable younger sister Sissy and the charming actress Miss Ricketts.