South of the River - Hardcover

Morrison, Blake

3.14

169 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701180463 ISBN 13: 9780701180461

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2007

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Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things are, South of the River is the big British novel for our times - and a tour de force.

It opens on the 'new dawn' of Labour's election victory in 1997, and ends five years later. But this is not so much 'state of the nation' as state of our souls, marriages, families, hopes and careers - a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters, all different yet connected. There's Nat, failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer, falling for a younger woman; Anthea, an eco-friendly lost soul obesessed with foxes; Libby, hardworking mother and advertising executive, the family breadwinner; Harry, Nat's friend and ex-pupil, a journalist on a local paper, with a guilty secret of his own; and Jack, Nat's blimpish but unexpectedly poignant uncle, who lives for fox-hunting, and runs a failing engineering company in East Anglia.

Beneath the bright familiar world of Blair's Britain, there's a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives. South of the River, a tale of five people, two rivers, and many Englands, metropolitan and rural, black and white, is gloriously readable and brimming with art and life.

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About the Author:

Born in Skipton, Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is the author of two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, the novel The Last Weekend and a study of the Bulger case, As If. He is also a poet, critic, journalist and librettist. He teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, and lives in south London.

Review:

"Brilliantly written, horribly truthful, utterly absorbing" -- Kate Saunders The Times "Morrison anatomises our times and achieves that rare thing: the creation of something substantial and important in fiction out of history as it unfolds in the here and now. His filleting of the new Labour zeitgeist is so ruthless and precise that one is torn between hilarity and despondency" -- Neel Mukherjee The Times "Often very funny, constantly vigorous, constantly intelligent, constantly enjoyable" Evening Standard "An ambitious stab at a state-of-the-nation novel pitched somewhere between Jonathan Coe and Franzen" Time Out "Intimate and epic, compulsively readable" -- Tony Parsons

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