Lead Review

• Book: Pleasured
• Location: Berlin
• Author: Philip Hensher

Hensher vividly captures the Zeitgeist of Germany’s painful reunification and the personal impact which the fall of the Wall had in both the East and the West. However, Pleasured is more than a meditation on the state of the German nation. It is also a wickedly observed comedy of manners, embracing drugs, terrorism, childhood, fatherhood and the vicissitudes of sexual identity in a series of elegantly drawn portraits and set pieces. Effortlessly written and beautifully structured, this is a great novel, which confirms Hensher as one of the finest novelists currently writing in English – Jerry Brotton –

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