Tenderness

  Listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction, Tenderness  (2021) is Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod’s fourth novel. On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover i s a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions, and a study in sensuality. But the author, D.H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies bereft.   MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel's origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer. In MacLeod's telling, Jackie—in her last days before becoming first lady—learns that publishers are trying to bring D.H. Lawrence’s long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The US government has responded by targeting the postal service for distributing obscene material. Enjoying what anonymity she has left, determined to honour a novel she loves, Jackie attends the hearing incognito. But there she is quickly recognized, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover takes note of her interest and her outrage.   Through the story of Lawrence’s writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the historic obscenity trial that sought to suppress it in the United Kingdom, and the men and women who fought for its worldwide publication, Alison MacLeod captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom.  “Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; [ Tenderness is] a novel of staggering elegance and beauty.” — Independent Alison MacLeod was born in Canada and has lived in the UK since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels , and Unexploded , which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013, and a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attractio n. MacLeod is the joint winner of the 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University.  Buy Now from Amazon Buy Now from Bookshop