Books written by Philip Hensher

King of the Badgers: A Novel

Best of all, there was a butcher. It was unexpected how butchers had become a means to register the life and independence of any English town. Until recently they had been an ordinary and unnoticed presence in a community of any size.
Why Willows Weep: Contemporary Tales from the Woods

With sales in hardback of 10,000 this collection has already helped the Woodland Trust plant nearly 50,000 trees across the United Kingdom, and it is now available in paperback for the first time.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 2: From P.G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from the 1920s to the present day.
The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

People have written by hand for thousands of years— how, Hensher wondered, have they learned this skill, and what part has it played in their lives? The Missing Ink tells the story of this endangered art.
The Missing Ink: How Handwriting Makes Us who We are

From the crucial role of handwriting in a child's development, to the novels of Dickens and Proust - and whether a person's writing really reveals their true personality - The Missing Ink goes in search of the stories and characters that ...
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 1: From Daniel Defoe to John Buchan

This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones.
Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story The

"We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of venues in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted many remarkable writers.
Scenes from Early Life: A Novel

Saadi tells the story of his childhood and of the ingenious ways his family survived the violence and conflicts: from his aunts stuffing him endlessly with sweets to stop marauding soldiers from hearing him cry, to street games based on ...
The Golden Age of British Short Stories 1890-1914

The great writers of the age produced some of their finest work, and literary genres - the ghost story, science fiction - took shape.
The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story

Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories, has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day.
The Friendly Ones

'It's the book you should give someone who thinks they don't like novels .
The Mulberry Empire: A Novel

At the center of The Mulberry Empire is Alexander Burnes, a Scots explorer who travels to the unfathomably remote kingdom of Afghanistan and first befriends and then reluctantly betrays its wise and impeccably courteous Amir.
A Small Revolution in Germany

A Small Revolution in Germany is about growing up, or refusing to accept what growing up means; it’s about the small dishonest pacts that people make with their own futures; and it’s about the rare and joyous refusal to be disillusioned ...
To Battersea Park

‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd ‘Surefooted and emotionally generous ... A serious achievement’ Guardian ‘Masterful’ Telegraph
The Northern Clemency

Expansive and deeply felt, The Northern Clemency shows Philip Hensher to be one of our most masterly chroniclers of modern life, and a storyteller of virtuosic gifts.
The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction

From the city's grand villas, elegant parks and botantical gardens to the brutalist 1960s high-rise estates, these stories take the reader on a literary tour of this vibrant, but often divided contemporary city.