The Northern Clemency

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.

The Northern Clemency begins at the perimeter of a late-summer party, amidst a din of neighbors gossipin [...]
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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.

The Northern Clemency begins at the perimeter of a late-summer party, amidst a din of neighbors gossiping one moment and navigating awkward silences the next. But once you encounter the Glover family -in particular, their languidly handsome teenage son Daniel - there's no turning back. The story that follows calls to mind novels by some of our best-loved family chroniclers - John Updike and Jonathan Franzen, to be sure, as well as Ian McEwan and Anne Tyler - and Hensher wrestles with the familiar notions of love and fidelity in ways that are appreciably unpredictable. His characters observe themselves and the ones closest to them in earnest, revealing facts and fallacies of their ordinary lives that make them extraordinarily real people to the reader. Hensher's style (which earned him a spot on the Man Booker Prize shortlist) is among the many qualities that make this novel shine.

It's wonderfully paced with language so beautiful and brutally honest that you'll find it hard not to start furiously underlining passages, particularly those about the city of Sheffield, whose families witness "the last phase of its industrial greatness" in 1974 and begin to experience the intensifying class wars that ensue. Though finely tuned to this point in time, and the following two decades, The Northern Clemency rings with the universal truth that family makes no sense, and yet makes all the sense in the world. /Anne Bartholomew