Het schrijfwerk van Philip Hensher wordt gekenmerkt door een ironische, wetende afstand en een ijskoud precieze ontleding van pretentie en hypocrisie, waarbij hij vaak menselijke relaties en sociale lagen verkent. Zijn historische romans echoën de ritmes en taal van volksverhalen terwijl ze speels omgaan met vertelvormen. Henshers onderscheidende stem en scherpe observaties maken zijn werk een belangrijke bijdrage aan de hedendaagse Britse literatuur. Naast zijn fictie is hij een gerespecteerd criticus en essayist, die een scherp intellect in de literaire discussie brengt.
Published to accompany the exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 15 June - 25 September 2005, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Sunderland, 6 October - 27 November 2005, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 December 2005 - 12 March 2006.
This is a novel that explores music, lying, marriage and cooking against the backdrop of contemporary Vienna. Fledgling singer Friederike marries English music-tender Archy who claims to have discovered the lost last act of Alban Berg's opera Lulu.
'Excellent, entertaining and ingenious ... from Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle, this fine anthology celebrates one of the richest moments in Britain's literary history' Sunday Times The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. Fuelled by a large new magazine readership and vigorous competition to acquire new stories and develop the careers of some of our greatest writers, these years were ones where the normal rule-of-thumb (novels sell, short stories don't) was inverted. This was the era of Sherlock Holmes, of Kipling's most famous stories, of M. R. James, Katherine Mansfield and Joyce's Dubliners. Some of the greatest writers of the period - particularly Conrad and James - found that the effort that went into their shorter works was more rewarded during their lifetimes than their now famous novels. Writers such as Mansfield, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Lawrence and Saki produced some of their greatest work. Short stories also provided a brilliant medium for experiment, and this generous and endlessly entertaining anthology includes fascinating examples of writers as varied as Rebecca West, James Joyce, H.G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis experimenting with what it was acceptable to write and how you could write it.
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, this is the new novel from the author of King of the Badgers' and the Man Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency'.
'Sometimes - not often - a book comes along that feels like Christmas. Philip Hensher's timely, but timeless, selection of the best short stories from the past 20 years is that kind of book. His introduction is as enriching as anything that has been published this year' Sunday Times A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories, has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day. Includes short stories by A.L. Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Graham Swift, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Martin Amis, China Miéville, Peter Hobbs, Thomas Morris, David Rose, David Szalay, Irvine Welsh, Lucy Caldwell, Rose Tremain, Helen Oyeyemi, Leone Ross, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Gerard Woodward, James Kelman, Lucy Wood, Hilary Mantel, Eley Williams, Sarah Hall, Mark Haddon and Helen Dunmore.
"Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas."--Back cover.
A novel based on the British experience in Afghanistan in the 1830s. It has at its heart the encounter between West and East as embodied in the complex relationship between the leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler.
The award-winning author of "The Mulberry Empire" presents a sweeping chronicle of ordinary lives that are profoundly shaped by both the subtleties of everyday experience and the larger forces of history.
In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside-down.
‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd ‘Surefooted and emotionally generous … A serious achievement’ Guardian ‘Masterful’ Telegraph