The spellbinding story of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the society that put it on trial; the story of a novel and its ripple effects across half a century, and about the transformative and triumphant power of fiction itself.
D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer.
Jacqueline and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial. A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love. Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it obscenity - or is it tenderness?
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781408884645
Number of pages: 640
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
Alison MacLeod has conjured a hugely daring, intrigue-packed, decade-jumping doorstopper that teasingly blends fiction and actuality with wit and panache - DAILY MAIL
Weaving together fact and fiction with impressive skill, MacLeod marshals a number of very different but interlinked narratives - THE TIMES, Best paperbacks of 2022
It’s an ambitious sprawl of a book, splendidly extreme in its magnitude, yet always elegant; a defence of complicated thinking and embodied life - GUARDIAN
What a triumph of skill and imagination is this powerful, moving, brilliant novel! I’ve never read anything quite like Tenderness, and I doubt I ever will again. This is more than a book about a book; this is a book about living - about really living, at the most dangerous and beautiful edges of the human experience. I stand in awe of Alison MacLeod. She is a novelist operating at the peak of her powers ... Tenderness is an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There’s nothing this writer can’t do - ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tenderness is a triumph and it will conquer your heart. Stunning, illuminating, but also, profoundly moving - ELIF SHAFAK
A propulsive, addictive, joyous read - Barney Norris, GUARDIAN
Weaving together fact and fiction with impressive skill ... Tenderness is a significant achievement, as life-affirming as Lawrence’s own fiction always aimed to be - SUNDAY TIMES, Historical Fiction Book of the Month
Gripping new novel... shows a mastery of her craft… a thrilling read - HARPER'S BAZAAR
Glorious and arresting ... A widescreen novel - OBSERVER
A work of huge imagination - THE TIMES
A compelling read … keen and elegant prose - LITERARY REVIEW
With a powerful mixing of the personal and the political, of fact and fiction, Alison MacLeod’s latest novel is a sweeping and immersive literary treat - LIVING MAGAZINE
As sublimely crafted as a novel could ever be. I’m in awe of Alison MacLeod’s powers. Tenderness is an intricate, mesmerising tapestry of love and regret, prudery and desire, loneliness and togetherness, loyalty and betrayal, and the enigmas and conundrums involved in the art of committing these experiences to the page - ISABELLA TREE
Gorgeously written and meticulously conceived, Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness presents history as it didn’t happen, and in so doing casts a new light on history as it did happen - DAVID LEAVITT
Tenderness is a passionate, epic joy. It's a paean to artistic imagination and freedom, and also to the messy complexity of humanity. The characters leap from the page with astonishing life that is all the more impressive given their historical fame. MacLeod's prose is a masterclass - gripping, lyrical, witty, razor-sharp and filled with, yes, tenderness. I will never forget it - MADELINE MILLER
Alison MacLeod has bored deep into significant cultural fault-lines of the twentieth century: D. H. Lawrence’s grappling with Edwardian England’s psychological timidity; America’s moment of political optimism with the Kennedys; the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She has disentangled connections - roots - between them and their participants, and emerged with a great sweeping symphony of a novel - TIM PEARS
She has produced a meticulously researched account ... This is a vol-au-vent … and it will change forever the way we read Lady Chatterley - Francis Wilson, SPECTATOR, Books of the Year
Magnificent … MacLeod covers an astonishingly broad range of incidents, eras, and themes in vivid prose, and depicts Lawrence’s supporters and opponents with equal insight and empathy … Triumphant … This places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sprawling and ambitious ... Completely engrossing - GOOD READING MAGAZINE
Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife will love the epic Tenderness - VOGUE AUSTRALIA
Tenderness is daring and innovative … MacLeod’s Tenderness has many tendrils, but throughout is a constant incantation about the power of fiction. The structure is unexpected and the story is epic and bold, and to quote from the book, it is also big-spirited and alive - ABC NEWS, Best New Books to Read in September
An exploration of society’s reaction to the infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the transformative and triumphant power of fiction itself - BETTER READING
A joyous celebration of the artistic life by a writer who takes courageous flight - TABLET
This is a sweepingly ambitious historical novel about the censorship and prosecution of the literary work which started the sexual revolution.
The story is set in different countries and time zones. It starts with...
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Tenderness is a sweeping historical novel which explores D.H. Lawrence's life and legacy, from his original conception of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1915 to the book's obscenity trial in 1960, which... More
From the amount of time it took me to finish this book, you would not have guessed at its length - I was so absorbed in the interwoven stories that I only ever put it down reluctantly.
I will definitely pick up my...
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