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The Friendly Ones
The things history will do at the bidding of love....
On a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif's party, Dr Spinster's actions are going to bring the two families together for decades to come.
The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression - things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged 18. How do you put these things right, in England, now?
Spanning decades, and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher's moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of and how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.
On a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif's party, Dr Spinster's actions are going to bring the two families together for decades to come.
The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression - things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged 18. How do you put these things right, in England, now?
Spanning decades, and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher's moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of and how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.
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First published March 8, 2018
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About the author
Philip Hensher
41 books111 followersHensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
April 19, 2018
Oh dear. I found this novel to be quite outstandingly bad. (What’s worse: it puts me in the uncomfortable position of having to say so about a gift from a dear friend).
At heart, it feels like a seriously botched job. Here’s a novel trying to be about enduring, pressing issues of our times - racism, war and migration - but plays them out in a sort of wittering, middle class sitcom, with a cast of characters of little psychological depth and little internal coherence. It really fluffs it.
Now, I don’t want to go anywhere near vacuous identity politics or ‘cultural appropriation’ territory, or indeed challenge anyone’s right to write about what they damn well like. But if you are a middle aged white man writing about the experience of being Bengali in late twentieth century Britain, you’d better do so extremely well. 'The Friendly Ones' doesn’t. The line ‘write about what you know’ was never more apposite.
For starters, the novel just doesn’t know how to handle racism - a subject it desperately wants to master. The passage of the Sharifullahs to England in the early seventies barely sees any racism. Their transition from Dhaka to well-to-do Sheffield suburb more or less just happens - they can even sell a house in Dhaka and buy one in England (that’s a pretty favourable exchange rate for a developing world country that’s just come out of a war!). Sure, Sharif gets yelled at by some youths twice and not all the neighbours are that interested, but the opposite of ‘Friendly Ones’ here isn’t ‘unfriendly ones’, it’s ‘not that bothered ones’.
For this reason, Aisha’s burning refrain that the immigrant has ‘a knife to the throat’ and steely claim that I Am Always An Immigrant feel weirdly incongruous and borrowed. Hensher hasn’t given her any experiences to support this; she swans through life. She’s already a sassy 21st century British Asian by 1976. Then she turns Shami Chakhrabati (who like the novel - as it happens - also rather whitewashed racism).
When it comes to race, there’s also an persistent air of polite cultural cringe and wishful thinking hanging over the novel. Many of the interactions between the Sharifullahs and the Spinsters are all ‘isn’t this lovely! An elderly English chap’s birthday party is being organised by the Bengali family next door!’. And listen! We're pronouncing their names properly! It’s that slightly self-congratulatory, inverted racist Baby Boomer reflex; feeling terribly proud that you went last week to ‘a Sikh wedding’ - instead of ‘a wedding’. (When German Boomers talk about their cross cultural experiences, I find they show a similar wide-eyed glee (“Sukita - she is a girl from Pakistan-no-India - made batchis! (sic). They were very nice but also very spicy!!!!!”)). In all this syrup, I found myself longing for a misanthropic V.S. Naipaul character to wade in and tell them all to just fuck off.
Moreover, it’s often plain boring in a pottering sitcom kind of way. I love a suburban novel; I also like bores in fiction. I’m never happier than in a seedy pub with a Patrick Hamilton bore boring a bored barmaid. But this is dull. Dropped into the British middle class, Nazia and Sharif quickly start acting exactly like them, and fucking hell is the domestic detail tedious. I’m assuming we’re supposed to feel good for them. There’s a long scene where Sharif is mowing the lawn and learning how to use a lawnmower (patronising much?) and I was dreading we’d have to follow him getting the strimmer out and creosoting the fence too. Or buying a sofa at IKEA. I just wanted him to run over the electric cable.
There’s a real lack of character development and coherence too. I just didn’t believe that the bright, young, self-possessed Aisha would write a love letter - out of the blue - to Leo, a diminutive bloke next door she’d only passingly met. I never understood why Leo walked out on this family (because his dad was acting up when his mum was terminally ill?). I didn’t understand why a sitcom middle class family had a daughter called ‘Trevor’ - like something kooky out of a fucking awful Nicola Barker novel. Oh, and the Spinsters are all around five foot. And did you have to call a character ‘Tom Dick’? Stop.
The writer also does that thing where he throws more characters onto the fire (Virginia Woolf on Dickens), only these are inconsequential cardigans with names like Steve Smithers and Marge Plopp. Oh, and do your research, man; would a hospice orderly in 1990s London earn enough to get a 90k mortgage? Would a games company set up in the nineties call itself ‘Fuck That’? (No).
In fairness, the strongest chapters were probably the University fresher experience - captured rather well (I have a feeling the writer is an academic, so this is perhaps home turf). I well remember the breathless autobiographical makeovers and Freshers' Week Fibs I heard in my first few weeks at college. I very briefly studied Law (before I realised that it wasn’t about debating and that ‘cases’ weren’t colourful Dickensian vignettes). One guy on my block was from Nuneaton, but pretended to be from Yorkshire, speaking in a Dad's impression of a Leeds accent. Another girl - later known as (plain old) 'Joanne' - first introduced herself to me and some other sociophobe as ‘Red’.
The real missed opportunity is that the episodes set in early seventies Bangladeshi weren’t given greater weight in the novel - they offered much more grit and urgency. I liked the atmosphere of foreboding and the excitement around the ‘Friend of Bangla Desh’. I instantly headed over to Wikipedia to learn more (a good sign, novelists). The stand-off between Sharif and Sadia was strong and spared us the ditsy comedy of manners in the UK chapters. It’s a shame more wasn’t made of this.
No, if you’re looking for an immigrant’s eye view of the UK, head instead to Sunjeev Sahota. Or even Londonistan - for all of its silly ending. If you want Indian subcontinent at war, Neel Mukherjee’s ‘The Lives of Others’ is great. This novel is a great reminder of the importance of observing that most basic of rules: ‘Write about what you know’.
Lastly, can we talk about the cover of the UK hardback? It is a wraparound painting of what looks like an Edwardian family on a picnic; sort of Famous Five or Swiss Family Robinson. For years I have amused myself with the satisfying (and only partially substantiated) prejudice that people who work in marketing for UK publishers are not-very-bright toffs. This has been my way of explaining the sheer crapness of book cover design in UK fiction in my adult life: all those god awful 'silhouette of man walking into the distance’ jobs and crappy copycat efforts.
So, tell me: which committee of fucking morons signed off a cover painting of an Edwardian family picnic for a 1970s-90s British-Asian family saga with core episodes happening during war and repression in Bangladesh? Maybe it's a stroke of genius, and shifted more than a half-appropriate cover design would have done. Maybe it did better in A-B testing. But I doubt it. Imagine the grit and character they could have got a designer to dial up. But no. A fucking Edwardian picnic. Jesus Christ.
At heart, it feels like a seriously botched job. Here’s a novel trying to be about enduring, pressing issues of our times - racism, war and migration - but plays them out in a sort of wittering, middle class sitcom, with a cast of characters of little psychological depth and little internal coherence. It really fluffs it.
Now, I don’t want to go anywhere near vacuous identity politics or ‘cultural appropriation’ territory, or indeed challenge anyone’s right to write about what they damn well like. But if you are a middle aged white man writing about the experience of being Bengali in late twentieth century Britain, you’d better do so extremely well. 'The Friendly Ones' doesn’t. The line ‘write about what you know’ was never more apposite.
For starters, the novel just doesn’t know how to handle racism - a subject it desperately wants to master. The passage of the Sharifullahs to England in the early seventies barely sees any racism. Their transition from Dhaka to well-to-do Sheffield suburb more or less just happens - they can even sell a house in Dhaka and buy one in England (that’s a pretty favourable exchange rate for a developing world country that’s just come out of a war!). Sure, Sharif gets yelled at by some youths twice and not all the neighbours are that interested, but the opposite of ‘Friendly Ones’ here isn’t ‘unfriendly ones’, it’s ‘not that bothered ones’.
For this reason, Aisha’s burning refrain that the immigrant has ‘a knife to the throat’ and steely claim that I Am Always An Immigrant feel weirdly incongruous and borrowed. Hensher hasn’t given her any experiences to support this; she swans through life. She’s already a sassy 21st century British Asian by 1976. Then she turns Shami Chakhrabati (who like the novel - as it happens - also rather whitewashed racism).
When it comes to race, there’s also an persistent air of polite cultural cringe and wishful thinking hanging over the novel. Many of the interactions between the Sharifullahs and the Spinsters are all ‘isn’t this lovely! An elderly English chap’s birthday party is being organised by the Bengali family next door!’. And listen! We're pronouncing their names properly! It’s that slightly self-congratulatory, inverted racist Baby Boomer reflex; feeling terribly proud that you went last week to ‘a Sikh wedding’ - instead of ‘a wedding’. (When German Boomers talk about their cross cultural experiences, I find they show a similar wide-eyed glee (“Sukita - she is a girl from Pakistan-no-India - made batchis! (sic). They were very nice but also very spicy!!!!!”)). In all this syrup, I found myself longing for a misanthropic V.S. Naipaul character to wade in and tell them all to just fuck off.
Moreover, it’s often plain boring in a pottering sitcom kind of way. I love a suburban novel; I also like bores in fiction. I’m never happier than in a seedy pub with a Patrick Hamilton bore boring a bored barmaid. But this is dull. Dropped into the British middle class, Nazia and Sharif quickly start acting exactly like them, and fucking hell is the domestic detail tedious. I’m assuming we’re supposed to feel good for them. There’s a long scene where Sharif is mowing the lawn and learning how to use a lawnmower (patronising much?) and I was dreading we’d have to follow him getting the strimmer out and creosoting the fence too. Or buying a sofa at IKEA. I just wanted him to run over the electric cable.
There’s a real lack of character development and coherence too. I just didn’t believe that the bright, young, self-possessed Aisha would write a love letter - out of the blue - to Leo, a diminutive bloke next door she’d only passingly met. I never understood why Leo walked out on this family (because his dad was acting up when his mum was terminally ill?). I didn’t understand why a sitcom middle class family had a daughter called ‘Trevor’ - like something kooky out of a fucking awful Nicola Barker novel. Oh, and the Spinsters are all around five foot. And did you have to call a character ‘Tom Dick’? Stop.
The writer also does that thing where he throws more characters onto the fire (Virginia Woolf on Dickens), only these are inconsequential cardigans with names like Steve Smithers and Marge Plopp. Oh, and do your research, man; would a hospice orderly in 1990s London earn enough to get a 90k mortgage? Would a games company set up in the nineties call itself ‘Fuck That’? (No).
In fairness, the strongest chapters were probably the University fresher experience - captured rather well (I have a feeling the writer is an academic, so this is perhaps home turf). I well remember the breathless autobiographical makeovers and Freshers' Week Fibs I heard in my first few weeks at college. I very briefly studied Law (before I realised that it wasn’t about debating and that ‘cases’ weren’t colourful Dickensian vignettes). One guy on my block was from Nuneaton, but pretended to be from Yorkshire, speaking in a Dad's impression of a Leeds accent. Another girl - later known as (plain old) 'Joanne' - first introduced herself to me and some other sociophobe as ‘Red’.
The real missed opportunity is that the episodes set in early seventies Bangladeshi weren’t given greater weight in the novel - they offered much more grit and urgency. I liked the atmosphere of foreboding and the excitement around the ‘Friend of Bangla Desh’. I instantly headed over to Wikipedia to learn more (a good sign, novelists). The stand-off between Sharif and Sadia was strong and spared us the ditsy comedy of manners in the UK chapters. It’s a shame more wasn’t made of this.
No, if you’re looking for an immigrant’s eye view of the UK, head instead to Sunjeev Sahota. Or even Londonistan - for all of its silly ending. If you want Indian subcontinent at war, Neel Mukherjee’s ‘The Lives of Others’ is great. This novel is a great reminder of the importance of observing that most basic of rules: ‘Write about what you know’.
Lastly, can we talk about the cover of the UK hardback? It is a wraparound painting of what looks like an Edwardian family on a picnic; sort of Famous Five or Swiss Family Robinson. For years I have amused myself with the satisfying (and only partially substantiated) prejudice that people who work in marketing for UK publishers are not-very-bright toffs. This has been my way of explaining the sheer crapness of book cover design in UK fiction in my adult life: all those god awful 'silhouette of man walking into the distance’ jobs and crappy copycat efforts.
So, tell me: which committee of fucking morons signed off a cover painting of an Edwardian family picnic for a 1970s-90s British-Asian family saga with core episodes happening during war and repression in Bangladesh? Maybe it's a stroke of genius, and shifted more than a half-appropriate cover design would have done. Maybe it did better in A-B testing. But I doubt it. Imagine the grit and character they could have got a designer to dial up. But no. A fucking Edwardian picnic. Jesus Christ.
March 20, 2018
The long and the short of it.
Despite its length, The Friendly Ones is not what might be termed a saga. It has none of that multi-generational ‘sweeping’ quality usually associated with the genre. Rather, it is an intense and intimate look at two families from different ethnic backgrounds, linked by the fact that they live next door to one another in a comfortable middle-class suburb of Sheffield.
When new neighbours, the Bangladeshi Sharifullah family, hold a house-warming party, retired doctor Hilary Spinster has an ideal vantage point of the proceedings from his tree-pruning perch in the next door garden. In a dramatic incident, he saves the life of one of the children and the stories of the two families take off from this point: the trials and tribulations of the vertically-challenged Spinsters, the difficulties faced by the Sharifullahs in both their old and their new homelands.
Though peppered with flashbacks (a narrative device that can often irritate) Philip Hensher uses them effectively and unobtrusively. This is a long book, some 600+ pages and some may find the author’s occasional Knausgaard-like dwelling on detail somewhat extraneous. But I have to say, I found Philip Hensher’s gallery of larger (and smaller) than life characters utterly compelling. He sure knows how to tell a story. Indeed, several.
Thanks to Fourth Estate for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
Despite its length, The Friendly Ones is not what might be termed a saga. It has none of that multi-generational ‘sweeping’ quality usually associated with the genre. Rather, it is an intense and intimate look at two families from different ethnic backgrounds, linked by the fact that they live next door to one another in a comfortable middle-class suburb of Sheffield.
When new neighbours, the Bangladeshi Sharifullah family, hold a house-warming party, retired doctor Hilary Spinster has an ideal vantage point of the proceedings from his tree-pruning perch in the next door garden. In a dramatic incident, he saves the life of one of the children and the stories of the two families take off from this point: the trials and tribulations of the vertically-challenged Spinsters, the difficulties faced by the Sharifullahs in both their old and their new homelands.
Though peppered with flashbacks (a narrative device that can often irritate) Philip Hensher uses them effectively and unobtrusively. This is a long book, some 600+ pages and some may find the author’s occasional Knausgaard-like dwelling on detail somewhat extraneous. But I have to say, I found Philip Hensher’s gallery of larger (and smaller) than life characters utterly compelling. He sure knows how to tell a story. Indeed, several.
Thanks to Fourth Estate for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
September 13, 2018
4.5 Stars!
“If I were Pakistani, I could understand your shouting “Paki” at me. I would not like it, but I would understand it. Do you know what I am? My country was Bangladesh. I have more reasons to hate the Pakistanis than you do. They ruled my country for twenty four years. They robbed us. They forbade us to speak our own language. When we voted for one of us to run the country, they annulled the election. They murdered people I knew and loved, and they murdered my brother.”
This is an ambitious and sprawling story spanning many decades, people and places, yet Hensher manages to retain a warmth and intimacy that keeps us glued to the plot throughout all 579 pages. This is a hugely enjoyable tale of shameless social climbing and cringe worthy code switching crazies. It’s also about the trials and tribulations of life at Oxbridge, it’s about snobbery in its many forms and the wonder and horror of families.
It’s also about displaced people trying to transition and integrate from one place to another and the many challenges and problems that can throw up. Hensher also explores the various cultural and religious tensions that flare up when deeply contrasting backgrounds rub up against each other in new situations.
“Italians were expected to be good looking. But Enrico sat with his pale fat hands, like wet skinned fish, his black chaotic hair about the bald dome. With his squashed, irregular and expository features, he looked like someone who should have been apologised for.”
Hensher ventures into acts of war and terrorism and the horrendous consequences for the many innocent people caught up in them. There are some superbly drawn characters in here, and they are put in many situations that bring out the best and worst of them over time. This does jump around a bit, but there are many absorbing twists and turns along the way. Hensher beautifully captures the essence of his characters, and I thought this book had the shape and feel of something somewhere between Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Coe.
May 16, 2018
There was a good book inside this one, but I found it sprawling in a bad way. Too many characters, too long a time period, too episodic. I enjoyed the section set in Bangladesh the most I think, which surprised me. His editor did not do their work properly. This book lacked a proper shape.
July 13, 2018
This book is kind of a mess. It jumps around throughout without any real sense of plot or structure, and while there is some nice writing in here, it never really comes together in a coherent whole.
July 5, 2019
To my shame, I had never heard of Philip Hensher, (prize winner and both long- and short-listed for the Booker), until a good friend gave me this book. I found it a compelling read, although it sprawls a little towards the end, full of interesting, engaging and, sometimes, disgusting characters.
In a pleasant suburb of Sheffield, the Sharifullahs move in next door to the Spinster family, headed by the irascible Dr Hilary Spinster. The author cleverly hides a minor, but surprising secret about the latter family which is gradually revealed as the story unfolds.
The narrative arc covers the early 1970s to almost the present day, and, because the Sharifullahs came to Britain at the end of the war of independence in Bangladesh, deals with some of that country's troubled history and the emotional, racial and physical fallout of the conflict. It also introduces us to a plethora of characters, in Bangladesh and in Sheffield.
This is a quite a complex book in which the author deals with subjects large and small, historical and immediate in an intelligent and sometimes provocative way. Some of the characters are hard to like, but they are never less than interesting, (although I found the lack of background on why Leo Spinster is the way he is a little frustrating).
I enjoyed the book, but would say it misses out on being a great read by a hair's breadth.
In a pleasant suburb of Sheffield, the Sharifullahs move in next door to the Spinster family, headed by the irascible Dr Hilary Spinster. The author cleverly hides a minor, but surprising secret about the latter family which is gradually revealed as the story unfolds.
The narrative arc covers the early 1970s to almost the present day, and, because the Sharifullahs came to Britain at the end of the war of independence in Bangladesh, deals with some of that country's troubled history and the emotional, racial and physical fallout of the conflict. It also introduces us to a plethora of characters, in Bangladesh and in Sheffield.
This is a quite a complex book in which the author deals with subjects large and small, historical and immediate in an intelligent and sometimes provocative way. Some of the characters are hard to like, but they are never less than interesting, (although I found the lack of background on why Leo Spinster is the way he is a little frustrating).
I enjoyed the book, but would say it misses out on being a great read by a hair's breadth.
September 9, 2020
This is a tale of two families, next door neighbours in an affluent area of Sheffield, one of which is English (the Spinsters) and the other Bangladeshi (the Sharifullahs). Their first encounter takes place at the Sharifullahs' moving-in party in the 1980s, and from there the narrative takes us back and forth in time and place, exploring each family's back story and their respective meandering paths towards another party, celebrated jointly in 2016, which constituted the finale.
The story is not narrated in chronological order, and reading it is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together - filling in bits round the edges and finding the odd piece that you know is going to be important and think might belong in the centre, but have to put aside until you're getting the fuller picture. We start in 1980s Sheffield, then we're in 1970s Bangla Desh with the Sharifullahs witnessing a family tragedy in the wake of the war with Pakistan, then back in 1970s Britain watching the Spinster children grow up, then springing forward through 1990s towards 2005 and the 7/7 London bombings ... sometimes I find this sort of thing disorientating, but because of the quality of the writing and the vividly drawn characters, I found it fascinating putting the pieces together.
Yes, it's a story about immigration and racism but it doesn't have an agenda and it doesn't preach. The 'Friendly Ones' of the title refer both to various neighbours the Sharifullahs encounter as they assimilate themselves to life in Britain ('she's one of the friendly ones'...) and also to the name of a league of feared informants during the struggle for independence in Bangla Desh. At one stage the point is made that 'it's class, not race, [that] divides people.' The successful, professional Sharifullah daughter is horrified by an encounter with illegal immigrants trafficked over to Britain and exploited by their own people; the neat little Taiwanese wife of a Spinster son is horrified by her husband's former Oxford friend whose life has spiralled into drug dependency.
More than anything, this is a story about family relationships, both between siblings and between parents and children. There are feckless, selfish parents as well as wise and generous ones; hurtful, ungrateful children as well as loving and dutiful ones; loyal, kind siblings as well as snobbish and cruel ones. Family betrayals, humiliations and not-so-subtle cruelties are meted out, as well as kindness and selflessness – one description of parental sacrifice, mundane on the outside but huge on the inside, is mentioned almost in passing towards the end of the book and makes for one of the most moving, understated passages I've ever come across in a novel.
A rare five stars from me.
The story is not narrated in chronological order, and reading it is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together - filling in bits round the edges and finding the odd piece that you know is going to be important and think might belong in the centre, but have to put aside until you're getting the fuller picture. We start in 1980s Sheffield, then we're in 1970s Bangla Desh with the Sharifullahs witnessing a family tragedy in the wake of the war with Pakistan, then back in 1970s Britain watching the Spinster children grow up, then springing forward through 1990s towards 2005 and the 7/7 London bombings ... sometimes I find this sort of thing disorientating, but because of the quality of the writing and the vividly drawn characters, I found it fascinating putting the pieces together.
Yes, it's a story about immigration and racism but it doesn't have an agenda and it doesn't preach. The 'Friendly Ones' of the title refer both to various neighbours the Sharifullahs encounter as they assimilate themselves to life in Britain ('she's one of the friendly ones'...) and also to the name of a league of feared informants during the struggle for independence in Bangla Desh. At one stage the point is made that 'it's class, not race, [that] divides people.' The successful, professional Sharifullah daughter is horrified by an encounter with illegal immigrants trafficked over to Britain and exploited by their own people; the neat little Taiwanese wife of a Spinster son is horrified by her husband's former Oxford friend whose life has spiralled into drug dependency.
More than anything, this is a story about family relationships, both between siblings and between parents and children. There are feckless, selfish parents as well as wise and generous ones; hurtful, ungrateful children as well as loving and dutiful ones; loyal, kind siblings as well as snobbish and cruel ones. Family betrayals, humiliations and not-so-subtle cruelties are meted out, as well as kindness and selflessness – one description of parental sacrifice, mundane on the outside but huge on the inside, is mentioned almost in passing towards the end of the book and makes for one of the most moving, understated passages I've ever come across in a novel.
A rare five stars from me.
November 21, 2018
I asked my local library to order this book. And now this is one of the best books in the Public Library of Tervuren here in Belguim. I love the way this book flows!
July 8, 2024
This is a big baggy book with all of the flaws that this normally entails. It’s rather disjointed, the dialogue can be a bit stilted and it takes until the final 100 pages to really understand why the families really link. However, for the most the part I quite enjoyed it. There was plenty about the characters that felt believable, it evoked elements of seventies and eighties Britain wonderfully and I really liked the background it gave me into Bangladeshi Independence.
Unfortunately this was all unmade in the final chapters of the book. The younger characters seemed to veer off in to the realms of absolute ridiculousness and the attempts to bring in more recent cultural and social phenomena felt completely cringeworthy. It seemed to go from a book that was making a serious point (although admittedly with a lightness of touch) to full on satire. I have read and enjoyed Hensher’s work in the past so would not give up on him but in the end for me this was sadly a bit of a disappointment.
Unfortunately this was all unmade in the final chapters of the book. The younger characters seemed to veer off in to the realms of absolute ridiculousness and the attempts to bring in more recent cultural and social phenomena felt completely cringeworthy. It seemed to go from a book that was making a serious point (although admittedly with a lightness of touch) to full on satire. I have read and enjoyed Hensher’s work in the past so would not give up on him but in the end for me this was sadly a bit of a disappointment.
February 11, 2021
A real saga spreading out for years and generations, from the 1970’s Bangladesh to nowadays England. History through the lives of two very different families, one very English, another immigrated from Bangladesh. A lot of details of the daily life in both countries is what makes the reading so vivid. I never knew the story of the Bangladeshi independence war, for example, that was interesting for me as well, as sad as it was.
Philip Hensher is a master of historical details which bring the particular period back to life. The book is like a time travel through the last fifty years and we can see how the world has changed. How the opportunities have changed so that being born into particular social ladder no longer predicts ones progress in life.
One of rare books I didn’t rush to finish. As usual, P. Hensher writes masterfully of its a pleasure to read. Despite its solid volume (almost 600 pages), I finished it in no time.
Philip Hensher is a master of historical details which bring the particular period back to life. The book is like a time travel through the last fifty years and we can see how the world has changed. How the opportunities have changed so that being born into particular social ladder no longer predicts ones progress in life.
One of rare books I didn’t rush to finish. As usual, P. Hensher writes masterfully of its a pleasure to read. Despite its solid volume (almost 600 pages), I finished it in no time.
March 26, 2023
I suppose I shouldn’t really rate this book because I’ve only read the first third of it but the entire time I was reading it I was wondering why this family from east Asia sounded and acted as though they were Lord and Lady Grantham of Downton Abbey (a male child in contemporary England reading an Enid Blyton book might be convincing if he was an outlier, not if he’s the rule) and then I discovered the writer is an upper class white Briton. There are SO many books by brown British people I haven’t read yet I just can’t waste my time on an unconvincing book written by someone who’s imagining what it would be like to be a brown Briton sorry Phillip
September 4, 2019
Well written and powerful
Read
June 20, 2019Couldn’t finish this, nowhere near as good as his others. I read to page 186, gave it a good go but it wasn’t getting any better.
February 29, 2020
This bulky read tells the intertwined tales of a family from Bangladesh and a retired GP’s family who are neighbours in a rather upmarket part of Sheffield. Hensher weaves a rich and fascinating tale of multiculturalism and the shifts of power and place. Recommended
August 10, 2025
DNF. There’s nothing specifically wrong with it, it just goes on and on and nothing much happens.
September 30, 2021
When retired doctor and soon-to-be-widower Hilary Spinster hovers over fence under the pretence of some gardening, his Bangladeshi neighbours, the Sharifullahs, watch him with hesitant patience. But when he leaps over the fence to save their young son it forms the first strands of a bond between the two families that will connect them over the next 40 years.
The Spinsters are small, unknowingly self absorbed and disappointed in themselves and each other. The Sharifullahs present themselves with the outwards nobility of all immigrant families in slightly PC 21st century novels. Their pasts, and attempts to navigate the stormy world of today, make a tapestry of stories that are woven together with the swooping arc of family saga.
The English chapters and charming, easy to read and vaguely Victorian in tone and pace. The Bangladeshi chapters fiery and gripping. Despite a slightly self congratulatory overtone this story is deeply affecting.
The Spinsters are small, unknowingly self absorbed and disappointed in themselves and each other. The Sharifullahs present themselves with the outwards nobility of all immigrant families in slightly PC 21st century novels. Their pasts, and attempts to navigate the stormy world of today, make a tapestry of stories that are woven together with the swooping arc of family saga.
The English chapters and charming, easy to read and vaguely Victorian in tone and pace. The Bangladeshi chapters fiery and gripping. Despite a slightly self congratulatory overtone this story is deeply affecting.
January 24, 2021
The Friendly Ones follows two neighbouring families in Sheffield, the Spinsters and the Sharifullahs, skipping forward and backwards in time between the 1970s to the present day.
The Spinsters are a solidly middle-class white family. The elderly parents are Celia and Hilary. Celia is dying of bowel cancer and Hilary, at first deeply unlikeable, announces that he intends to divorce her and wishes to do so before she dies, although she has only months left to live, as it transpires to punish a decades-old transgression. Next door are the Sharifullahs, a Bangladeshi family who move to Sheffield permanently in the 1970s as their newly-formed country implodes and they struggle to come to terms with their own family tragedy.
The Spinsters are a family on the decline, with disintegrating relationships and children permanently divorcing themselves from the family. The Sharifullahs’s time in Britain by contrast charts an upwards trajectory, most evidently played out through space, as they progress through Sheffield real-estate. The final sections of the novel are perhaps a little heavy-handed in stressing this and it begins to feel a little like a children’s morality tale, where the spoilt Spinster children get their comeuppance and the hard-working Sharifullah’s become millionaires and a Baroness.
I’m still ambivalent about this book a week on from finishing it. I think there’s a question as to whether Hensher is the best person to tell the Sharifullah’s story, although this is mitigated by the fact that his husband Zaveed Mahmood is Bangladeshi-born and has inspired other works of Hensher’s and admittedly the most interesting section of the book are the passages set in Dacca . There are too many secondary characters, including Ada Browning the engineering department secretary; the real estate agent who has a page or so dedicated to her casual racism and the revisiting of Enrico to indicate Aisha’s success and there are some bizarre scenes which appear to add little to the plot, as when one of Aisha’s school friends converses with the spirits. With too wide a focus, a lot of the characters became bland and uninteresting and their motivations weren’t explained, leading to abrupt and illogical choices – Aisha’s love letter to Leo and then later Leo’s brief flirtation with the idea to run away with Aisha on meeting her for the first time in decades (despite his marriage and young child) spring to mind here.
There are some redeeming factors. I learnt about the formation of Bangladesh with the Friend of Bangladesh and the intense fighting between the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. There are compelling parts of the plot, including Hilary’s wish to divorce Celia, his gradual transformation into a more sympathetic character and the Sharifullah family rift which is slowly explained. A brief interaction between Aisha and an old school-friend (now an immigration lawyer) raises an interesting point about who is an immigrant and what defines that identity, comparing the highly-educated and well-off Aisha, whose father is an engineering professor at the University of Sheffield and whose mother owns multiple properties to her friend’s clients, who live in squalid conditions with 18 men in a house, who has to lock his food in a cupboard to stop the other men eating it and is fighting to remain in the country. Beginning and ending with family parties, the first for the Sharifullahs and the second for Hilary’s 100th birthday, brings a neat sense of resolution to the story whilst allowing some obvious comparisons between the two families.
Overall a mediocre read – not one I regret spending time on but not one that I want to revisit, falls short of expectations built by The Northern Clemency.
The Spinsters are a solidly middle-class white family. The elderly parents are Celia and Hilary. Celia is dying of bowel cancer and Hilary, at first deeply unlikeable, announces that he intends to divorce her and wishes to do so before she dies, although she has only months left to live, as it transpires to punish a decades-old transgression. Next door are the Sharifullahs, a Bangladeshi family who move to Sheffield permanently in the 1970s as their newly-formed country implodes and they struggle to come to terms with their own family tragedy.
The Spinsters are a family on the decline, with disintegrating relationships and children permanently divorcing themselves from the family. The Sharifullahs’s time in Britain by contrast charts an upwards trajectory, most evidently played out through space, as they progress through Sheffield real-estate. The final sections of the novel are perhaps a little heavy-handed in stressing this and it begins to feel a little like a children’s morality tale, where the spoilt Spinster children get their comeuppance and the hard-working Sharifullah’s become millionaires and a Baroness.
I’m still ambivalent about this book a week on from finishing it. I think there’s a question as to whether Hensher is the best person to tell the Sharifullah’s story, although this is mitigated by the fact that his husband Zaveed Mahmood is Bangladeshi-born and has inspired other works of Hensher’s and admittedly the most interesting section of the book are the passages set in Dacca . There are too many secondary characters, including Ada Browning the engineering department secretary; the real estate agent who has a page or so dedicated to her casual racism and the revisiting of Enrico to indicate Aisha’s success and there are some bizarre scenes which appear to add little to the plot, as when one of Aisha’s school friends converses with the spirits. With too wide a focus, a lot of the characters became bland and uninteresting and their motivations weren’t explained, leading to abrupt and illogical choices – Aisha’s love letter to Leo and then later Leo’s brief flirtation with the idea to run away with Aisha on meeting her for the first time in decades (despite his marriage and young child) spring to mind here.
There are some redeeming factors. I learnt about the formation of Bangladesh with the Friend of Bangladesh and the intense fighting between the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. There are compelling parts of the plot, including Hilary’s wish to divorce Celia, his gradual transformation into a more sympathetic character and the Sharifullah family rift which is slowly explained. A brief interaction between Aisha and an old school-friend (now an immigration lawyer) raises an interesting point about who is an immigrant and what defines that identity, comparing the highly-educated and well-off Aisha, whose father is an engineering professor at the University of Sheffield and whose mother owns multiple properties to her friend’s clients, who live in squalid conditions with 18 men in a house, who has to lock his food in a cupboard to stop the other men eating it and is fighting to remain in the country. Beginning and ending with family parties, the first for the Sharifullahs and the second for Hilary’s 100th birthday, brings a neat sense of resolution to the story whilst allowing some obvious comparisons between the two families.
Overall a mediocre read – not one I regret spending time on but not one that I want to revisit, falls short of expectations built by The Northern Clemency.
May 25, 2020
I'm a big 'always judge a book by its cover' kind of person, so if this hadn't have been a book club read for me I honestly could say I think I'd have gone my whole life without every getting anywhere near reading this book. Sometimes a book that I think is going to be not my thing surprises me, but unfortunately I was pretty right on this one.
The book tells the stories of two neighbouring families in the UK. It kicks off with Nazia and Sharif hosting a massive family party, whilst their elderly neighbour Doctor Spinster looks on and tries to get involved. Chapters then switch between Sharif and Nazia's life and Hilary Spinster and his family's.
We switch between Sheffield and Bangladesh, where Nazia and Sherif lived before moving to the UK. In Sheffield we are taught about the struggles of a seemingly loveless marriage between Hilary and his wife Celia. In Bangladesh the reader learns about the history around the lead up to independence for the country. It was an interesting read, but I found myself only wanting to hear about Nazia and Sherif's story. I've never read a book set in Bangladesh before, and it made Hilary's side of spoiled adult kids not caring about their parents totally drag in comparison.
I'm really not a massive fan of literary realism, and whilst some people in my book group loved the author taking you through the mundanity and boring parts of both families' everyday life, it's really something I wasn't a fan of. There were definitely parts I loved, but sometimes it took another 100 pages to get to another bit I enjoyed, so I've given the book three stars. I'd recommend this if you're a fan of Sally Rooney's 'Conversations with Friends'.
The book tells the stories of two neighbouring families in the UK. It kicks off with Nazia and Sharif hosting a massive family party, whilst their elderly neighbour Doctor Spinster looks on and tries to get involved. Chapters then switch between Sharif and Nazia's life and Hilary Spinster and his family's.
We switch between Sheffield and Bangladesh, where Nazia and Sherif lived before moving to the UK. In Sheffield we are taught about the struggles of a seemingly loveless marriage between Hilary and his wife Celia. In Bangladesh the reader learns about the history around the lead up to independence for the country. It was an interesting read, but I found myself only wanting to hear about Nazia and Sherif's story. I've never read a book set in Bangladesh before, and it made Hilary's side of spoiled adult kids not caring about their parents totally drag in comparison.
I'm really not a massive fan of literary realism, and whilst some people in my book group loved the author taking you through the mundanity and boring parts of both families' everyday life, it's really something I wasn't a fan of. There were definitely parts I loved, but sometimes it took another 100 pages to get to another bit I enjoyed, so I've given the book three stars. I'd recommend this if you're a fan of Sally Rooney's 'Conversations with Friends'.
April 4, 2018
I was instantly drawn into this multi-generational insight into neighbouring households. It appears initially as a parallel telling of Sheffield residents as Northern Clemency but it is rather a different beast. Again, however this is a LONG book and you need to invest in it.
As I have read neither Eugene Onegin nor The Winters Tale, its re-telling was lost on me. I wonder whether this is a "new thing" like Home Fires (Kamila Shamsie re-telling Antigone) or whether authors previously assumed their readers literary brainstock and ability to spot the author sources and how they had dog-legged the plotting.
The family stories current and back lurched about with a vast cast of characters covering the birth of Bangladesh, exile, conflict and both long & foreshortened lives. Parts were hugely absorbing and others seemed to me to be so pedestrian in order to detail how family members behave. Whilst the everyday was part of the book's charm, it is impossible to retain these meanderings when there are so many players without confusing the reader (or this reader) So many felt like caricatures as a result.
Think it would have benefited from some heavy red pen editing and an improved presentation of the story arc. However I did enjoy so many parts of both the writing and story and did keep chuckling when reminded that a branch of family were all under 5 '2"...
As I have read neither Eugene Onegin nor The Winters Tale, its re-telling was lost on me. I wonder whether this is a "new thing" like Home Fires (Kamila Shamsie re-telling Antigone) or whether authors previously assumed their readers literary brainstock and ability to spot the author sources and how they had dog-legged the plotting.
The family stories current and back lurched about with a vast cast of characters covering the birth of Bangladesh, exile, conflict and both long & foreshortened lives. Parts were hugely absorbing and others seemed to me to be so pedestrian in order to detail how family members behave. Whilst the everyday was part of the book's charm, it is impossible to retain these meanderings when there are so many players without confusing the reader (or this reader) So many felt like caricatures as a result.
Think it would have benefited from some heavy red pen editing and an improved presentation of the story arc. However I did enjoy so many parts of both the writing and story and did keep chuckling when reminded that a branch of family were all under 5 '2"...
June 25, 2018
One of my favorite novelists, Henscher once again focuses on the complexity of human relationships. Here, two very different families are neighbors in the U.K. and, over the course of 40 years, interact in multiple ways including, in the opening pages, an act which will literally save the life of a young boy. An immigrant family from Bangladesh, headed by an engineer and his wife and their children, and a U.K. physician and their children, learn to appreciate each other. Some themes emerge over the nearly 600 pages...the need for friendship/love (even the title is ironic as it refers to the anti-nationalist forces in Bangladesh that forced the family to flee), the need for forgiveness (of self and others), etc. The author reveals that he took portions of the book from Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" (we learn that one family's son was fathered by another man) and "Eugene Onegin" (full disclosure: I had to look this up b/c I'm not a fan of Russian lit; one character's family member is kidnapped and killed). Much like "The Emperor Waltz" and "King of the Badgers," we end up learning much about ourselves after reading a Henscher novel.
June 17, 2018
The only reason I haven't given this five stars is that it did take me a while to get into and I had to resort to checking the reviews to see whether it was worth continuing (it was). It's a saga, spanning 30 years, about two neighbouring families in Sheffield - one, the Spinsters, a typical middle-class English family and the other, Sharif, Nazia and their three children, are from Bangladesh. The story moves backwards and forward in time and between Sheffield and Bangladesh. Although I could not get on with any of the Spinster family, all of whom seem narrow-minded, self-centred and generally unpleasant, I have to say all the characters are well drawn and developed, with many insights into family dynamics, social customs and political trends. The Bangladesh scenes are particularly good in this respect. I listened to this on audible (23 hours) and it was very well read by Chetan Pathak (fortunately, as that's a long time to live with a narrator's voice).
January 24, 2020
The book took a while, in my opinion, to get going, but once it did, about a third of the way through, I simply loved it.
I found both the English and the Bangladeshi families totally believable, and cared about every character in the book (with the exception of the Italian boyfriend, who wasn’t particularly important so that didn’t matter).
I lived in Dhaka for several years, and saw how the Liberation War had affected every Bangladeshi family I met. While I was there I saw Philip Hensher speak at the Dhaka Hay Festival.
His portrayal of historical events seems accurate, and the detail in the dialogue and in the different lifestyles authentic. He explores the themes of race, family values, and class and culture differences in a way that will keep me thinking about the book for a long time.
I found both the English and the Bangladeshi families totally believable, and cared about every character in the book (with the exception of the Italian boyfriend, who wasn’t particularly important so that didn’t matter).
I lived in Dhaka for several years, and saw how the Liberation War had affected every Bangladeshi family I met. While I was there I saw Philip Hensher speak at the Dhaka Hay Festival.
His portrayal of historical events seems accurate, and the detail in the dialogue and in the different lifestyles authentic. He explores the themes of race, family values, and class and culture differences in a way that will keep me thinking about the book for a long time.
May 14, 2018
I hadn’t terribly enjoyed Hensher’s previous book ‘The Northern Clemency’ but wanted to give him another try. This was, for me, much more enjoyable; an epic stretching through the latter half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, examining changing social norms and attitudes. It focuses head on the huge impact of Asian immigration on UK society, and in particular the fall out from the British colonial empire. Seeds of terrorism are traced back to the creation first of Pakistan and subsequently of Bangladesh. The vehicle for the story traces the lives of two neighbouring families, one from the solid English middle classes, and the other from the educated elite of Bangladesh. A hugely engaging read to the very last sentence.
January 18, 2019
Families are messy, with pasts that are hidden from so many, even within their own circle of close friends and relations. This is as terrific multigenerational novel, dealing with two families who become next door neigihbours in Sheffield: one is white, and the other Bangladeshi, both from professional backgrounds, covering the period from the 1970s to the present. So many characters, but they are easily differentiated, and the 2 locations: the UK (Sheffield, London, home counties) and Bangladesh are so well portrayed. I loved all the popular culture/politics references, which set the time periods brilliantly. The appalling genocide in Bangladesh at the birth and in the first few years of the country's existence, and the Britons' ignorance concerning it, are shockingly depicted.
July 31, 2020
Set mainly in Sheffield with a lot of back story in Bangladesh I'm not sure whether the book was about the white British family or about the Bangladeshi family trying to settle in Britain or about the genocide in Bangladesh. Learned a lot about the history of Bangladesh and the war with Pakistan through the backstories but there's also a lot of detailed backstory about all the Sheffield family members. If you like backstories and you like detail in your stories then this could be the book for you. I would like to give it 3.5 stars but that's not possible here so I've given it 4 because I did enjoy it and thought it well written.
June 21, 2018
I heard this book reviewed on a BBC Radio 4 podcast and it sounded good. Luckily it was available through our wonderful library request system in Adelaide. I read 200 of the 580 odd pages and surprised myself. I truly enjoyed the descriptions and style but oh my, the story never progressed and I eventually gave up on it. I loved what I read but there wasn't sufficient meat to keep me going, hence the 2 stars. Disappointing but I may come back to finishing it one day when I have time to spare in my rocking chair.
April 23, 2019
This is a story of two families, who at first seem only to be very tangentially connected - but the connections keep growing as the story progresses. The story of the English family includes some harrowing scenes of bullying by children of other children and describes a rather dysfunctional set of relationships; the story of the Bangladeshi family includes harrowing details of the events leading up to and following the creation of Bangla Dash. But there are several aspects to the stories of these families, and the feelings which remain at the end are hopeful and optimistic.
July 19, 2020
Some may think The Friendly Ones too long and self-indulgent, but the overall effect for me was a perfectly proportioned gem in the slice-of-life genre (the literary equivalent to film/tv's mumblecore?).
Focussing on the (somewhat) intertwined and deeply complex history of two families--one, white British; the other, British Bangladeshi--Hensher really has produced a marvellous, grand narrative. His portrayal of Bangladesh during its war of independence against Pakistan was moving to the point of painful without any gratuitousness.
Superb.
Focussing on the (somewhat) intertwined and deeply complex history of two families--one, white British; the other, British Bangladeshi--Hensher really has produced a marvellous, grand narrative. His portrayal of Bangladesh during its war of independence against Pakistan was moving to the point of painful without any gratuitousness.
Superb.
April 6, 2023
Wow. What a wonderful novel this is. It's the first I've read by Philip Hensher and it is impressive and quite beautiful. The story of two families who live next to one another in an English city over multiple generations. One of the families has immigrated from Bangladesh and the story carefully brings in the horrors of the 1971 war and atrocities. The other "English" family disintegrates over time, as families can. There are no good guys or bad guys (well, maybe with one exception) in this story, just people buffeted by time and the rigors of life. So good.
February 18, 2018
A long well plotted epic novel spanning several generations of two neighbouring families in Sheffield and what transpires to them both.
A well established patriarchal family and newly arrived immigrants find their stories intertwined in a lush tale which is sympathetically told by a splendid author.
Despite the plethora of characters introduced and the length of the book, my attention was held throughout and the time Invested was fully rewarded.
Thank you Mr Hensher.
A well established patriarchal family and newly arrived immigrants find their stories intertwined in a lush tale which is sympathetically told by a splendid author.
Despite the plethora of characters introduced and the length of the book, my attention was held throughout and the time Invested was fully rewarded.
Thank you Mr Hensher.
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