The Northern Clemency

Starred review from November 3, 2008
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.

November 1, 2008
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 teenagers —it '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 about —and 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 (2008) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2008
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.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2008
Henshers sixth novel was shortlisted for, but did not win, the Man Booker Prize. With a time line starting in 1974, its 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, its old-fashioned in its pace and attention to daily lifeand 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 books heft will be rewarded by poetic prose and astonishingly lifelike character sketches, by Henshers 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)