The new novel from the Booker shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency

An order is issued. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside, and the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of pomeloes emerges. The imagination reaches out, and makes sense of the world. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence.

There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence, a young mind beginning to stretch itself); to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.

Written in four parts, To Battersea Park explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time. It shows what brings us together, through love, through the clashes of what we want to do and what the world wants to do with us. Set in a large crowded city where we are forbidden to approach strangers, this is about what we share: humanity, imagination, and the love that emerges from many acts of telling.

‘Electrifying … works like this… allow the imagination to roam free and wild’ Observer

‘Wise, ingenious and passionate’ TLS

‘Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown to reveal – hilariously, tenderly, shockingly – how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among’ Financial Times

‘An engrossing human drama’ The Times

‘An imaginative tour de force’ Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors

‘An utterly engrossing skein of narratives, beautifully written and often disturbing’ Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory

‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd, author of The Romantic

‘Surefooted and emotionally generous … A serious achievement … Less a book about the pandemic and more a book about the stories we tell ourselves about the pandemic; billions of stories, fragile, partial, and essential, each one a small but vital act of reclamation and remembrance’ Guardian

‘Interesting and innovative … A different kind of state-of-the-nation novel; an exercise in imagination and empathy born out of a moment of collective crisis’ Daily Telegraph

‘A revelation: a comedy of suburban manners slowed to the point of nightmare’ Spectator

‘Challenges everything we might have taught ourselves to expect from fiction… Wise, ingenious and passionate’ TLS

‘Bears [Hensher’s] hallmark brilliance … Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown’ Financial Times

‘Eloquently distils the way in which enforced social distancing made us see the world around us through fresh eyes … an impressive addition to the canon of lockdown fiction’ Mail on Sunday

‘Playful, philosophical, sensual, violent and funny … But above all, it’s defiant: an account of confinement that refuses to be confined’ Literary Review

‘A master novelist and prose stylist … Shifts from sublimely evoked reality to terrifyingly, clearly imagined dystopia’ Country Life

‘Masterly in marrying observations of the minutiae of the lives of ‘ordinary’ people with huge, soaring themes’ AnOther Magazine

‘An imaginative tour de force. The first great lockdown novel, and perhaps the only one we'll need’ Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors

‘Utterly engrossing’ Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory

Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012, The Friendly Ones and A Small Revolution in Germany. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in south London and Geneva.