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Title: King of the Badgers

Author: Philip Hensher

Narrator: Mike Rogers

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-31-11

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

After the success of The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of the small English town of Handsmouth.

Usually a quiet and undisturbed place situated on an estuary, Handsmouth becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. The town fills with journalists and television crews, who latch onto the public's fearful suspicions that the missing girl, the daughter of one of the town's working-class families, was abducted.

This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth, and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Handsmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade the extraordinary individual lives of the community are exposed. The undisclosed passions of a quiet international aid worker are set against his wife, a woman whose astonishing aptitude for intellectual pursuits, such as piano-playing and elaborate cooking, makes her seem a paragon of virtue to the outside world. A recently widowed old woman tells a story that details her late discovery of sexual gratification. And the Bears - middle-aged, fat, hairy gay men, given to promiscuity and some drug abuse - have a party.

As the search for the missing girl elevates, the case enables a self-appointed authority figure to present the case for increased surveillance, and, as old notions of privacy begin to crack, private lives seep into the public well of knowledge.

Handsmouth is a powerful study of the vital importance of individuality, the increasingly intrusive hand of political powers, and the unyielding strength of Nature against the worst excesses of human behaviour.

Critic Reviews:

"Hensher has a forensic eye for detail, providing nightmarish glimpses of the everyday. engrossing, amusing and moving." (The Independant)

Members Reviews:

State of England

I enjoyed this one very much couldn't stop listening once I started. Hensher's a smooth, but not mechanical, plotter, and has a lovely eye for rural detail. I liked all his characters, even the quite dastardly ones, and felt with them throughout. Just the kind of state-of-England novel I was in the mood for, not as formally or stylistically inventive as Martin Amis (thank goodness for that), nor as ultimately forgettable as J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, to which Badgers bears several uncanny resemblances in its setting and manner (it was published quite a few years before, I should add).

Mike Rogers was the perfect reader, just the right wry tone, and (though I'm no authority) a goodly range in accents Yorkshire, West Country, generic gentry, bolshy teenager. I recommend it without qualification.

Multi-faceted novel written for adults

If you could sum up King of the Badgers in three words, what would they be?

Complex, contemporary, intelligent.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Sam the cheesemonger, because I readily identified with him - as an urbane gay man vegetating in a dismal semi-rural setting.

What does Mike Rogers bring to the story that you wouldnt experience if you had only read the book?

Nothing specific; although he is an excellent narrator with a good command of dialect.