To Battersea Park

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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
A revelation Spectator

The new novel from the Booker shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency

An 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 Park explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time. It shows what brings us together, through love, through the clashes of what we want to do and what the world wants to do with us. Set in a large crowded city where we are forbidden to approach strangers, this is about what we share: humanity, imagination, and the love that emerges from many acts of telling.

Electrifying works like this allow the imagination to roam free and wild Observer

Wise, ingenious and passionate TLS

Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown to reveal hilariously, tenderly, shockingly how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among Financial Times

An engrossing human drama The Times

An imaginative tour de force Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors

An utterly engrossing skein of narratives, beautifully written and often disturbing Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory

Reviews

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 [Henshers] 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, its 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

Author Bio

Philip Hensher is a columnist for the Independent, arts critic for the Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written six novels, including The Mulberry Empire and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and one collection of short stories. He lives in South London.