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Imprint: Harvill Secker
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Published: 16/07/2020
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ISBN: 9781787301139
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Length: 320 Pages
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Dimensions: 222mm x 144mm x 144mm
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Weight: 461g
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RRP: £16.99
The Family Clause
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Jonas Hassen Khemiri
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Alice Menzies (Translator)
*Finalist for the US National Book Award in Translated Literature*
An addictive novel about contemporary parenthood and modern family life.
'A beautiful study of familial need and mess...insightful till it hurts.' Nikita Lalwani
'Bold and remarkable...full of heart and compassion.' Dinaw Mengestu
A grandfather returns home from abroad to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather, the proud patriarch, is perfect - at least, according to himself.
Over the course of ten intense days, the relationships of this chaotic and entirely normal family unfold and painful memories resurface. Something has to give. But the son is duty-bound to his father through an arrangement they call 'the father clause'. Can it be renegotiated, or will it bind everyone to the past forever?
In The Family Clause, multi-award-winning writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri has created a tender, funny and bruising novel about what it means to be a good parent, the difficulty of understanding those closest to us, and how it sometimes takes courage just to stick around. An ode to families, their dynamics, their boundaries and their silences, in all their messy glory, it reveals one of the real challenges in life: how to stop your family defining your destiny.
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Imprint: Harvill Secker
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Published: 16/07/2020
-
ISBN: 9781787301139
-
Length: 320 Pages
-
Dimensions: 222mm x 144mm x 144mm
-
Weight: 461g
-
RRP: £16.99
Reviews
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A beautiful study of familial need and mess, in which the universal and the particular play footsie with each other. Deft, artful, but above all insightful till it hurts, this is Khemiri’s best yet.
Nikita Lalwani
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A bold and remarkable novel - a marvel of form and imagination that is also miraculously full of heart and compassion.
Dinaw Mengestu
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Absent fathers, wayward children, generational strife and the sheer fatigue of new parenthood... Khemiri's prose has a zing and bite stylishly served by Alice Menzies's pacy, idiomatic translation...The Family Clause [has] an epic, as well as a comic, buoyancy.
Boyd Tonkin, Spectator
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The dynamics of each relationship are superbly complex, and Khemiri's wry, comic touch gives a lightness to the inevitability as the children follow in their father's footsteps.
Catherine Menon, Guardian
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Excellent... Exquisitely translated by Alice Menzies... What Khemiri achieves is not just an engrossing narrative but the complex portrait of a family that is both identifiable and distinctive, normal and strange.
Tabish Khair, Times Literary Supplement
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An exceptionally well-constructed novel.
Irish Times
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Satisfying . . . Khemiri succeeds at creating an infectious sense of melancholia as the poisonous patriarch is forced to reckon with the truth. In a slow build of quotidian moments, Khemiri constructs a familiarly flawed universe that lays bare what it means to be human.
Publishers Weekly
