Description
Book SynopsisA brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers' William BoydSurefooted and emotionally generous A serious achievement' GuardianMasterful' TelegraphA revelation' SpectatorThe new novel from the Booker shortlisted author of The Northern ClemencyAn order is issued. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside, and the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of pomeloes emerges. The imagination reaches out, and makes sense of the world. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence.There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence, a young mind beginning to stretch itself); to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.Written in four parts, To Battersea
Trade Review‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd, author of The Romantic
‘Surefooted and emotionally generous … A serious achievement … Less a book about the pandemic and more a book about the stories we tell ourselves about the pandemic; billions of stories, fragile, partial, and essential, each one a small but vital act of reclamation and remembrance’ Guardian
‘Interesting and innovative … A different kind of state-of-the-nation novel; an exercise in imagination and empathy born out of a moment of collective crisis’ Daily Telegraph
‘A revelation: a comedy of suburban manners slowed to the point of nightmare’ Spectator
‘Challenges everything we might have taught ourselves to expect from fiction… Wise, ingenious and passionate’ TLS
‘Bears [Hensher’s] hallmark brilliance … Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown’ Financial Times
‘Eloquently distils the way in which enforced social distancing made us see the world around us through fresh eyes … an impressive addition to the canon of lockdown fiction’ Mail on Sunday
‘Playful, philosophical, sensual, violent and funny … But above all, it’s defiant: an account of confinement that refuses to be confined’ Literary Review
‘A master novelist and prose stylist … Shifts from sublimely evoked reality to terrifyingly, clearly imagined dystopia’ Country Life
‘Masterly in marrying observations of the minutiae of the lives of ‘ordinary’ people with huge, soaring themes’ AnOther Magazine
‘An imaginative tour de force. The first great lockdown novel, and perhaps the only one we'll need’ Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors
‘Utterly engrossing’ Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory
