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    The Friendly Ones
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    The Friendly Ones
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    The Friendly Ones
    Audiobook22 hours

    The Friendly Ones

    Written by Philip Hensher

    Narrated by Chetan Pathak

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMar 8, 2018
    ISBN9780008175672
    Unavailable
    The Friendly Ones
    Author

    Philip Hensher

    Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012, The Friendly Ones and A Small Revolution in Germany. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in south London and Geneva.

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