Hanmouth, Angleterre. Une petite ville de bord de mer à la vie douce où, selon la formule consacrée, « personne n'a rien à craindre, puisque personne n'a rien à cacher ». Le jour où la petite China disparaît mystérieusement, les journalistes envahissent la place et commencent à menacer la vie privée des habitants.
Mais celle-ci ne l'était-elle pas déjà ? En effet, comme partout, les parents espionnent les adolescents ; les voisins s'épient les uns les autres ; les amis, les commerçants, tout le monde est à l'affût. Entre médias, caméras de surveillance et smartphones, il semble aujourd'hui illusoire de vivre sans témoins, garder un secret est mission impossible. Et des secrets, à Hanmouth, tout le monde en a : adultère, sexualité débridée, drogue. des vices qui, privés, sont inoffensifs mais qui, mis en place publique, deviennent meurtriers. Alors que les recherches pour retrouver China s'intensifient, la paranoïa va s'accroître, jusqu'à un dénouement inattendu.

Vices privés

Hanmouth, côte ouest de l'Angleterre. Une petite ville de bord de mer à la vie douce, sans aspérités, où, selon la formule consacrée, « personne n'a rien à craindre, puisque personne n'a rien à cacher ». Le jour où Shannon, une petite fille des quartiers défavorisés, disparaît mystérieusement, les journalistes qui envahissent la place commencent à menacer la vie privée des habitants. 

Mais celle-ci ne l'était-elle pas déjà ? Un bref aperçu de la situation révèle vite que tous sont déjà, et depuis longtemps, sous surveillance. Les parents espionnent les adolescents ; les voisins s'épient les uns les autres ; les amis, les professeurs, les commerçants, tout le monde est à l'affût. Entre médias, caméras de surveillance et autres smartphones, il est devenu impossible aujourd'hui de vivre sans témoins, garder un secret semble devenu mission impossible. Et des secrets, à Hanmouth, tout le monde en a : adultère, sexualité débridée, drogue... des vices qui, privés, pourraient être inoffensifs mais qui, lorsqu'ils sont mis en place publique, peuvent devenir meurtriers. 

Alors que les recherches pour retrouver Shannon s'intensifient, la paranoïa va s'accroître, jusqu'à un dénouement parfaitement inattendu.

Avec cette formidable comédie noire, roman choral qui n'est pas sans évoquer les meilleurs séries d'HBO, Philip Hensher se fait le miroir non seulement d'un pays, mais d'une époque tout entière. Menant de front une intrigue palpitante, une galerie de personnages inoubliables et une réflexion tragi-comique sur l'érosion des libertés individuelles et collectives, il nous offre un portrait au vitriol de la société moderne, à la fois très lucide, très sombre et remarquablement drôle. Moraliste sans concession, satiriste impitoyable et conteur à l'habileté diabolique, il confirme avec ce roman jubilatoire sa place, aux côtés de Ian McEwan et Jonathan Coe, parmi les plus grands romanciers britanniques contemporains

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'.

 "I was a baby during the war. We stayed inside for months. All my aunts took turns in feeding me. I couldn't be heard to cry. You see, there were soldiers in the streets. They would have known what a crying baby meant. So I had to be kept silent. No, not everyone came out of the war alive."

 One family's life, and a nation - Bangladesh - are uniquely created through conversation, sacrifice, songs, bonds, blood, bravery and jokes. Narrated by a young boy born into a savage civil war, 'Scenes from Early Life' is a heartbreaking, funny and gripping novel by one of our finest writers.

Scenes from Early Life

After the success of The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us another slice of contemporary life, this time the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of a small English town.

 After the success of The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of the small English town of Handsmouth.

 Usually a quiet and undisturbed place situated on an estuary, Handsmouth becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. The town fills with journalists and television crews, who latch onto the public's fearful suspicions that the missing girl, the daughter of one of the town's working-class families, was abducted.

 This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Handsmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade the extraordinary individual lives of the community are exposed. The undisclosed passions of a quiet international aid worker are set against his wife, a woman whose astonishing aptitude for intellectual pursuits, such as piano-playing and elaborate cooking, makes her seem a paragon of virtue to the outside world. A recently-widowed old woman tells a story that details her late discovery of sexual gratification. And the Bears - middle-aged, fat, hairy gay men, given to promiscuity and some drug abuse - have a party.

 As the search for the missing girl elevates, the case enables a self-appointed authority figure to present the case for increased surveillance, and, as old notions of privacy begin to crack, private lives seep into the public well of knowledge.

 Handsmouth is a powerful study of the vital importance of individuality, the increasingly intrusive hand of political powers and the unyielding strength of Nature against the worst excesses of human behaviour.

King of the Badgers

Décrivant le Berlin des années vingt, Christopher Isherwood y évoquait des étudiants, des jeunes femmes troublées et des businessmen louches. Il les faisait se rencontrer dans des bars et des lieux marginaux, partisans du Front rouge, pendant que divers événements historiques se déroulaient autour d'eux.
Décrivant le Berlin des années quatre-vingt, Philip Hensher évoque des étudiants, des jeunes femmes troublées et des businessmen louches. Il les fait se rencontrer dans des bars et des lieux marginaux, partisans de la Fraction Armée rouge pendant que divers événements se déroulent autour d'eux.
En cinquante ans, rien n'a changé à Berlin et pourtant tout y est différent. Le talent de Philip Hensher est d'avoir échappé à l'ombre du grand Isherwood et d'avoir su trouver sa propre voi(e)x.

La ville derrière le mur - Occasion

The bestselling novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers.

 'The Mulberry Empire' is a seemingly straightforward historical novel that recounts an episode in the Great Game in central Asia - the courtship, betrayal and invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s by the emissaries of Her Majesty's Empire, which is followed by the bloody and summary expulsion of the Brits from Kabul following an Afghani insurrection (shades of the Soviet Union's final imperial fling in the very same country in the 1980s).

 The novel has at its heart the encounter between West and East as embodied in the likeable, complex relationship between Alexander Burnes, leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.

 For those who enjoyed William Dalrymple's 'Return of a King', 'The Mulberry Empire' is a must-read.

The Mulberry Empire

A Small Revolution in Germany is about growing up, or refusing to accept what growing up means; it's about the small dishonest pacts that people make with their own futures; and it's about the rare and joyous refusal to be disillusioned.

 Everyone remembers what it's like to be seventeen. The conversations you have; the ideas that burst on you; the kiss that transforms you. And then you grow up, and make a deal with adulthood. A Small Revolution in Germany is about that rapturous moment when ideas, and ideals, and passion crash over one boy's head. And what happens in the decades afterwards? When you see the overwhelming truth when you are seventeen, why should you ever abandon that truth?

 Spike is brought into a small, clever group of friends, bursting with a passion for ideas, and the wish to change the world. They smash up political meetings; they paint slogans on walls; they long for armed revolution; they argue, exuberantly, until dawn. In the years to follow, they all change their minds, and go into the world. They become writers, politicians, public figures. One of them becomes famous when she dies. They all change their minds, and make sensible compromises. Only Spike stays exactly as he is, going on with the burning desire for change, in the safe embrace of unconditional love. Alone from the old group, he is the only one who has achieved nothing, and who has never deviated from the impractical shining path of revolution he saw as a teenager. Thirty years on, photographs of the teenage group look like a bunch of celebrated individuals, with only one unknown face in it - Spike.

A Small Revolution in Germany

'It's the book you should give someone who thinks they don't like novels . Here is surely a future prizewinner that is easy to read and impossible to forget' Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

 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, Doctor 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 eighteen. 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; how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.

Vices privés

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