Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life

In 2008, the editors at Amazon named their #1 overall best book of the year Philip Hensher's great big brilliant gay-inclusive sixth novel The Northern Clemency [Kindle], which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Since then he's published another large novel King of the Badgers [Kindle] (memorable for its respectable gay bear couple hosting their monthly, drug-dabbling orgy the same night the village newcomers have a cocktail party, with some impromptu cross-pollination) and a nonfiction book about the lost art of handwriting.

Pubbed in England last April, yesterday saw the US release of Hensher's shorter new book, Scenes from Early Life [Kindle], a hybrid memoir/novel closely based on his husband's childhood in Dhaka, where he and his cousins play games based on Kojak, Dallas, and Roots while their parents struggle under the terrible civil war that will separate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Favorably compared to work by Rushdie and Vikram Seth, the book is "one of the most delightful and engaging descriptions of family life to have been published for many years," "suffused with tenderness, yet altogether free from sentimentality," and, "a richly depicted saga of childhood joys and sorrows...his most purely pleasurable novel to date," according to three UK critics. It was shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize.