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Nov 25, 2008

GillyP rated it:

THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY by PHILIP HENSHER

This is a most interesting book. A truly epic tale (around 300,000 words) of the everyday that follows the lives of two Sheffield families from the seventies to the mid nineties – and it really is a story of the everyday. Nothing truly momentous happens, even the ‘Big’ events are the Big things that happen to us all; death, sudden life threatening illness, emigration, job change, a court case. Nothing world-shattering happens. There are no start More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2009

David rated it:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: IF YOU LOVED (HATED) "THE CORRECTIONS", YOU'LL LOVE (HATE) THIS.

OK. Let's get the whole rating thing out of the way right now. Objectively speaking, this is a three-star book. But I enjoyed it very much - and read all 600 pages in about a day and a half. Which I think deserves some acknowledgement. There are many, many books that are far superior to "The Northern Clemency", but are way less fun to read. So I'm giving it 4 stars.

Here More...

5 comments like (11 people liked it)

May 28, 2011

Lisa rated it:

I loved this. I don't think it's 'great' literature, but for nearly three weeks as I listened to it en route to work, I found it vastly entertaining - in the way that a well-constructed soap opera is entertaining.
Other reviewers haven't been especially kind to it, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/apr... or http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar... and http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-revie...
Would I have enjoyed it as much without the excellent narration by Carole Boyd More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 16, 2009

Alex rated it:

This sweeping novel covers decades in the lives of two families in suburban Sheffield in a series of episodes of varying length exploring family life, love and romance, growing up, Thatcher-era politics (particularly the miners' strike), the death of the English cities, and identity in all its shapes and forms. With nine main characters and plenty of peripheral ones, it's not surprising a book of such scope comes to 750 pages, but it is an easy read and can be done quite quickly and enjoyably. More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 11, 2009

Michael rated it:

What is it about Brits and novel-writing? Must be something in the water. They are so good at it. Or, rather, they are very good at a particular type of novel (what F.R. Leavis would call "The Great Tradition") that I really gravitate toward. The finest American novelists tend toward the mythopoetic (Ellison, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville) whereas the best Brits tend toward the secular and social. This is a reduction, but not a gross one, and many implic More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 06, 2009

Warren marked it as to-read

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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 re More...

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Jul 29, 2011

Stuart added it

I really enjoyed this, but at the end i wondered what had happened. It was like reading a diary of a few families over twenty years in Sheffield, England. IN practice, really two families, living across the road from each other. The book's incidents take place in three decades - the mid 1970's, the mid 1980's and the mid 1990's. The first two sections are characterized by miners' strikes and the effect on their communities and the people within them. The third decade shows how people have chan More...

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Feb 27, 2011

Susan rated it:

If you had asked me a week ago if I liked this book, I would have groaned and rolled my eyes. I completely stalled about 35% of the way into the book. I stalled there for about a month by reading other books and entire issues of the LA Times, unable to commit to finishing the Northern Clemency. Then with a quiet weekend of time, I picked it up again and within an hour or so, I was hooked into the rhythm of Hensher's story - a rhythm that totally eluded me earlier.

The story mainly fo More...

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Jan 20, 2011

Glorialaihuang rated it:

Dear Lord, this book felt long. It also seems to progress in fits and starts - I found myself becoming engrossed in some parts, only to suddenly find myself sloshing through a randomly-placed description of the English moors. The story is nearly epic in scale - it follows the lives of several townspeople who live in an industrial village in Northern England during the 70s and the 80s. I will concede that the author effectively paints the Thatcherite/miner strike mood of the time. But I could More...

3 comments like

Dec 10, 2010

Felice rated it:

I have to warn you I'm going to need some extra adjectives here. I might be saying brilliant, wonderful, impressive and glorious so often that I have to resort to using multi-layered as well. Let me apologize in advance for that. I've read The Northern Clemency (picked up solely because it is so very extra chubby) by Philip Hensher and it is fantastic. You can stop reading my puny writing now and go get a copy of it if you want. I won't be insulted.

Clemency starts out in 1970's Sheff More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 23, 2010

Isabelle rated it:

I should have loved this book; it has everything that makes a novel I cannot put down... loads of character, great settings, multi-generational plot spanning over decades etc...
The story takes place in Yorkshire, Sheffield actually and follows the trials and tribulations of two middle-class families living across from each other. In turn and through time, we "touch base" with each character: the two couples, together and separately, and the five children whose paths cross every s More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 13, 2009

Bill rated it:

It is 1974 in Sheffield, England. The Glovers, Malcolm and Katherine, have lived in an estate development for some time and the Sellerses, Bernie and Alice, are in the process of moving into a house across the street from the Glovers. They are moving from London. The Glovers have three children, Daniel, Jane and Tim, and the Sellerses two, Sandra and Francis. Malcolm is employed by a building society and Bernie works for the Electricity, the nationalized public utility.

Hensher is More...

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Jun 18, 2009

jillian rated it:

This was a brilliant book. It's one of those wonderfully crafted books that goes so far into human nature, into the pieces of atypical, illogical behavior that, despite their strangeness, are still universally sympathetic. Set over two decades in Sheffield, UK, it follows two families through the events and non-events of their lives. It also gives a true insight into the lives of the coal miners and the social conditions that surrounded the decline of the mines, and the onset of the Thatcher More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 06, 2009

Ian rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 03, 2011

Mamta rated it:

I think this book compared rather favourably in its maturity, in its measured and rounded exploration of the characters that populate it, to the far flashier "The White Tiger" that stole the Booker for that year. This is not a book with a big idea or even a big character....it’s about, well, the little people, the people who fade into the multitude, the ordinary who muddle through an ordinary life. It is an insightful book, shrewdly observing and drawing up a narrative of the normal, r More...

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Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it:

Philip Hensher has been compared to Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Ian McEwan, and Virginia Woolf, among other respected literary writers, living and dead. No pressure there. For all its grounding in the classics��past and present��Hensher's latest novel elicits the sort of ambivalence from critics that often accompanies such sprawling tomes (Janet Maslin, for instance, calls the book "overlong, but �� relentlessly enveloping"). Most critics agree

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Jan 14, 2009

Julie rated it:

I went into this book thinking that I might find it fabulous, given some of the reviews and the subject matter. That attitude usually seems to put a book——or a movie, or a person——at a disadvantage because so much is expected. Well, this is a long, winding narrative filled with characters who, at best, are mostly only semi-likeable. The writing is generally very good, although this was one of those books in which I not infrequently stopped and reread sentences, wondering exactly what the author More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Paddy rated it:

I would offer clemency to Hensher if he had cut out 150 to 200 pages of this novel, in which only a couple of minor characters (Helen's parents) captured me. If I could drum up more interest in the characters, I would examine them in terms of clemency. As it is, I'll let Daniel's final thoughts as the novel closes suffice--he knew all along Helen would forgive him for his book buying indulgence. Yes, the 1970s domestic aesthetics are reminiscent of things one remembers. Thatcherism isn't pretty. More...

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Jan 10, 2009

Laura rated it:

"He got into bed and turned his face to the wall, away from her side. All her life, Katherine had had a bedtime routine, and now she did it, muddy and torn, bruised and untended as she was. She took off her mud-encrusted skirt, her shredded slip, her torn and earth-painted blouse. In her bra and knickers, she sat down at the dressing-table. She took a puff of cotton wool from a transparent plastic tube, and opened a pot of cold cream. It seemed appalling to her that these familiar things ha More...

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Jun 10, 2010

Alice rated it:

One of my favorites of 2010 so far. I asked the clerk at my favorite bookstore if she could recommend something, and she walked out with The Little Stranger (read and loved), Let The Great World Spin (which I was reading, at least until my Kindle got stolen), and this book. I have to go back and thank her. Hensher has written a big, sprawling multi-family saga of 1970's middle-class England, accurate down to the smallest detail, and full of hilarious moments. I think one of the reasons I liked t More...

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Mar 20, 2010

Athena rated it:

I picked this book out at the library because the cover noted that it was shortlisted for the Man Booker (in 2008) and that's enough for me. I did not read (and don't even recognize) the book that won that year, but boy, *The Northern Clemency* is a winner. The book opens in the house of the Glovers, with Katherine Glover and some of the women in her neighborhood gossiping: an opening in the spirit of Tolstoy and *War and Peace*. So I was hooked. If I'd had the luxury to sit around and read this More...

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Feb 06, 2011

Paul rated it:

One of the more engaging novels I've read recently, what appears at first glance to be a gentle, modest story about middle-class British family life reveals itself to be a multi-generational saga spanning two decades; in short, a novel about everything that's important, told with penetrating insight, brutal honesty, and wry humor. I have to share this part: the novel begins with a glimpse of Daniel Glover, 16-year-old son of Malcolm and Katherine, lounging about with a visible erection during a More...

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Dec 12, 2008

Liza rated it:

I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I thought that Hensher absolutely nailed the atmosphere of suburban living in his mostly compelling descriptions of the geography, boredom, and claustrophobia. He also nailed British white middle class identity. On the other hand, some of The Northern Clemency's characters were repugnant, seeming more like caricatures that plausible humans.</p>

I think the problem with this book is that it simply covers too much time. First it focuses on two

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Jul 31, 2011

Catherine added it

I thought this was a well written book that got a little bit harder to hold together as it went along--at the beginning the families are living in the same town, next to each other, nad as the story progresses, the kids all grow up and move away, and so it naturally becomes more disjointed as the stories are less interwoven for the individuals involved--but I thought it was more disconnected than that would explain, and didn't like the way it ended--should have been longer or shorter--told more More...

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Feb 06, 2009

Jennifer rated it:

The Northern Clemency tells the 25-year story of two families living in suburban Sheffield, England, from the day in 1974 when the Sellers move from London to the house across the street from the Glovers, who just happen to be in the middle of a domestic crisis. This book seems like an answer to those times when you're looking out the train window heading north from London and, by the time the post-war housing is passing by, you're wondering what their inhabitants' lives are like. (I still don More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 11, 2010

George rated it:

Beginning in England in 1974, The Northern Clemency tells the story of 2 families, with a number of side characters introduced along the way, who are featured for a very short while before disappearing or moving to the sidelines. Using decade-long leaps, the book follows the families into the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than one large plotline, it is composed of various subplots, which, thanks to the timespan, rarely last the whole book, although their consequences might only become apparent in late More...

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Feb 08, 2009

Julie rated it:

I just loved this book. I loved it so much, I even loved the contents page. The book isn't divided into chapters. Instead, it has:-

Book One
Mardy

Book Two
Nesh

Book Two-and-a-half
In London

Book Three
Gi'O'Er

Book Four
The Giant Rat of Sumatra.

I loved the humour that's even present on the contents pages. But even more than that - the language speaks to me in so many ways. That word "nesh" - More...

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Aug 05, 2011

Katie added it

For all the hype about this sweeping saga of the intertwinned lives of two neighbouring families in 70s and 80s Sheffield, I found this strangely underwhelming (not to mention, at 700 pages, a bit too drawn out). Maybe because, while the author undoubtedly has an eye for the details of food, clothing and landscape which successfully bring a place and time to life, his characters never quite seem to make the leap from the page as 'real people,' always seeming at the mercy of the writer. And the o More...

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Jul 21, 2009

Lucy J rated it:

A monster at 737 pages - ideal for holiday reading. Divided into 4 sections, three of which being called Mardy, Nesh and Gi'oer do give you a clue along with the title about the area in which this novel is set.

A family move from down south to South Yorkshire in the seventies. Oooh, spookily familiar.... So the power cuts, miners strike, Pot Noodles, Austin Allegros, Jackie magazine elements all struck a chord.

Not a lot happens, in some senses (but then, not a lot did). I More...

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Apr 12, 2009

Veronica rated it:

Somehow Philip Hensher has managed to pass me by up to now, but when I read a review of this novel and discovered it's set in Sheffield during the 1970s, I couldn't resist. It's billed as a state-of-the-nation saga on a Tolstoyan scale, following the fate of two families, the Sellers and the Glovers, from 1974 to 1994. It's certainly Tolstoyan in size, weighing in at a hefty 736 pages, but it lacked the historical sweep of Tolstoy. Tolstoy sets the minutiae of his characters' lives in the wider More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)