South of the River - Hardcover

Blake Morrison

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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Review:

[Morrison's] prose has the diamond cut of a poet's eye, and his story is suffused with warmth and longing (Independent)

Enormous imaginative reach, transporting us beyond mere testimony or reportage... I don't expect to read a more enthralling memoir [Things My Mother Never Told Me] all year. Or a finer book on love and love's impediments. (New York Times)

South of the River is a Bonfire of the Vanities for Blair's Britain. Intimate and epic, compulsively readable, this is a big ambitious book in every way, a novel of the heart and mind, the personal and the political, the kind of intellectual blockbuster that we get from Philip Roth at the top of his game. Blake Morrison is a bloody marvel. Read his first novel. In fact, you should read everything that carries his name. (Tony Parsons)

A scintillating read. (GQ)

From the Publisher:

The big British novel for our times, the English Corrections -
but sexier, sharper, broader and infinitely more recognisable

The perfect novel for readers of contemporary British fiction by Justin
Cartwright, Alan Hollinghurst and Jonathan Coe

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