The year is 1974, and Katherine dutifully cooks dinner every night for her drab husband, two secretive sons and quarrelsome teenage daughter. As Katherine serves the meal, she feels keenly aware that almost nothing in the dining room was chosen by her; she is surrounded by gifts and hand-me-downs, to the point where she has come to feel invisible.  This is the night when Katherine will tell her husband, Malcolm, whose passionate interests include gardening, that she has taken a job working for the new florist (not mentioning that her boss is willing to flirt with her). It’s a change that will have unimaginably embarrassing repercussions.  Mr. Hensher uses a slightly heavy hand to make those flowers metaphorical. (“You forget about when things bloom naturally,” Katherine tells her husband about the tulips at the flirty florist’s. Malcolm replies that florists’ tulips are forced.) And Mr. Hensher expounds at punishing length about the workaday minutiae of horticulture. Yet he also, most important, makes Katherine a credible, affecting character who rises above caricature and whose daily routines are in themselves quietly revelatory. Great Russian novels are an inspiration to this big, strong, extremely English one.  The Glovers have long been in residence when the Sellerses, uprooted from a home in London (“the house had drained downwards, like a bucket with a hole”), become their new neighbors in 1974. Bernie Sellers is employed by “the Electricity,” a public utility that will be privatized during the Thatcher years in one of the background events that give this two-family story its sketchy claim to political relevance. His wife, Alice, is not easily acclimated to her mousy new surroundings.  Francis remains remote, an observer; Sandra, his loose cannon of a sister, becomes a force in the lives of both Glover brothers, the seductive teenager (Daniel) and the disturbing 10-year-old (Tim). Jane, the gimlet-eyed Glover daughter, becomes the book’s first link to Australia, where it will take a surprisingly rapturous turn in its later stages. Sydney is presented as so free, promising and beautiful that it is “a Sheffield which had died and gone to heaven.”  In telling these characters’ interwoven stories (and in bringing them full circle, so that Daniel, originally contemptuous of items on his mother’s menu, winds up as a restaurateur who serves the same food in a manner he intends as ’70s ironic), Mr. Hensher writes as both literary lion and critic. His language is caustic and extremely particular, to the point where some of its sections have titles derived from Sheffield slang (“Mardy,” “Nesh” “Gi’o’er”). It’s also unflinchingly accurate in describing the ways both sets of parents age and both sets of children struggle awkwardly to find their adult footing.  Though it is in some ways as opaque as its title, “The Northern Clemency” creates a piercingly insightful group portrait. There is dazzling hyperrealism in Mr. Hensher’s descriptive powers.  Although his other oddly titled books (“Kitchen Venom,” “Other Lulus,” “Pleasured,” “The Mulberry Empire”) are either little known or out of print here, with this book Mr. Hensher (also a columnist for The Independent) is apt to be an instant hit with American audiences. The book is overlong, but it is relentlessly enveloping. His references to English banalities (i.e., coronation chicken) become exotic exports. And his precision has bite, even when it describes only helplessness and malaise.  Thinking of Tim, her youngest and spookiest child, Katherine “couldn’t remember having sex after 1962 — but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done.” Without compromising his book’s ferocity, Mr. Hensher manages to make that thought more compassionate than cruel.  597 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C9 of the New York edition with the headline: A Group Portrait With an Unflinching Focus. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Philip Hensher’s new novel is a haunting, loving, trenchantly grotesque story about two families in Sheffield, England, over the course of two politically fraught decades.