“What a triumph of skill and imagination is this powerful, moving, brilliant novel! I’ve never read anything quite like Tenderness, and I doubt I ever will again.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love
For readers of A Gentleman in Moscow and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, an ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the novel that set off the sexual revolution.

On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is 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.

Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison 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. Exquisite, evocative, and grounded in history, Tenderness is a testament to the transformative power of fiction.

Alison MacLeod's profile page

ALISON MacLEOD grew up in Montreal and Halifax, and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels, and Unexploded, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. She has also published two collections of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction and All the Beloved Ghosts, which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Until 2018, she was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester, when she became Visiting Professor, to work full-time on Tenderness. She lives in Brighton and is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

Praise for Tenderness:
One of:
Quill & Quire’s “2021 Best of Fall guide”
CBC’s “65 Canadian works of fiction to watch for in fall 2021”

"[A] compelling read. In keen and elegant prose, Macleod dramatises a significant moment in Britain’s cultural and social history, when the country stood on the cusp of embracing wider personal freedoms. Her novel vindicates reading as a transcendental act."
—The Literary Review

“MacLeod pulls off a magnificent nonlinear spin on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the censorship of literature during D.H. Lawrence’s life and beyond. . . . MacLeod covers an astonishingly broad range of incidents, eras, and themes in vivid prose, and depicts Lawrence’s supporters and opponents with equal insight and sympathy. Her Lawrence, meanwhile, muses that a good book ‘sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across spaces, decades and centuries... over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.’ A triumphant demonstration of that power, [Tenderness] places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[A] large-hearted celebration of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. . . . MacLeod moves, with dexterity and ease, between the heads of Lawrence and various defenders of the novel. . . . [Tenderness] is an ambitious sprawl of a book, splendidly extreme in its magnitude, yet always elegant; a defence of complicated thinking and embodied life.”
—The Guardian

“Tenderness is a passionate, epic joy. It’s a paean to artistic imagination and freedom, and also to the messy complexity of humanity. The characters leap from the page with astonishing life that is all the more impressive given their historical fame. MacLeod’s prose is a masterclass—gripping, lyrical, witty, razor-sharp and filled with, yes, tenderness. I will never forget it.”
—Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe

“What a triumph of skill and imagination is this powerful, moving, brilliant novel! I’ve never read anything quite like Tenderness, and I doubt I ever will again. This is more than a book about a book; this is a book about living—about really living, at the most dangerous and beautiful edges of the human experience. I stand in awe of Alison MacLeod. She is a novelist operating at the peak of her powers—no less a genius than the master whose work she has so lovingly and shrewdly explored here. She moves across time and space like a wizard, wrapping up fact within fiction so magically that you can’t find a seam anywhere. Tenderness is an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There’s nothing this writer can’t do.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love
“As sublimely crafted as a novel could ever be. I’m in awe of Alison MacLeod’s powers. . . . [M]esmerising.”
—Isabella Tree, author of Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

‘‘Alison MacLeod has bored deep into . . . cultural fault-lines of the twentieth century . . . and emerged with a great sweeping symphony of a novel.”
—Tim Pears, author of The West Country Trilogy

“In her novel Tenderness, Alison MacLeod traces Lady Chatterley’s sources in the thickets of Lawrence’s own biography, then follows its tortured progress towards the light through the indecency trial. In doing so, she offers up two visions of what a novelist can be – the novelist as alchemist, turning the straw of his life into gold and not counting the cost, and the novelist as historian of ideas. Her focus shifts elegantly, imagining Lawrence as he nurtures ideas in sequences rich with poetic memory, then recounting the trial with journalistic rigour… These shifts seem effortless because MacLeod’s subject sits above them all, uniting threads – the story of how a story made its way into the world. It’s a brilliant insight to build a novel on… [A] propulsive, addictive, joyous read… Victories for freedom should be sung from the rooftops. That is what MacLeod has done."
—The Guardian

“Gorgeously written and meticulously conceived, Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness presents history as it didn’t happen, and in so doing casts a new light on history as it did happen. Weaving together real and fictional narrative lines, and featuring as its protagonists no less likely a duo than D. H. Lawrence and Jackie Kennedy, this novel reminds us what a vital form the uchronia can be.”
—David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place

“Tenderness is amazing. It is a book about love and struggle—the subjects of all the greatest novels. It lifted my heart and tore at it. I loved the novel so much I have to go back and read it again. Genius!”
—Vicki Feaver, author of The Handless Maiden and I Want! I Want!

“Tenderness is a triumph and it will conquer your heart. Stunning, illuminating, but also, profoundly moving.”
—Elif Shafak, author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

"Gripping new novel. . . . shows a mastery of her craft... a thrilling read."
—Harper’s Bazaar
"Alison MacLeod has conjured a hugely daring, intrigue-packed, decade-jumping doorstopper that teasingly blends fiction and actuality with wit and panache… Lawrence espoused a philosophy of ‘naturalness’ and this novel makes great play with double lives and secret selves. It also suggests how great books reveal truths, making the case not only for the author’s most famous work, but for the power of literature itself."
—The Daily Mail
"Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife will love the epic Tenderness."
―Vogue Australia

"This legacy of censorship is animated in Alison MacLeod’s fiction homage to Lawrence’s novel, which captures the romanticism of the author and his heroine. But it also does something else: Tenderness is daring and innovative… The structure is unexpected and the story is epic and bold, and to quote from the book, it is also big-spirited and alive..."
—ABC, "Best Books of September"
"Glorious and arresting ... A widescreen novel."
—Observer

"Bold, compassionate and lyrical, I found myself totally lost in it.."
—Alice Jolly, critic and author of Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile

"[Takes] the reader across the decades to interweave and pull together stories of love and literature, sensuality and censorship. With a powerful mixing of the personal and the political, of fact and fiction, Alison MacLeod’s latest novel is a sweeping and immersive literary treat."
—Living Magazine
"Sprawling and ambitious. . .Completely engrossing."
―Good Reading Magazine

“Brilliant . . . MacLeod evokes Lawrence's world beautifully, and her Kennedy subplot works shockingly well, as does the students' relationship, which evokes the passion that powered all of Lawrence's work . . . [Tenderness is] brimming with deeply felt life.”
―Booklist, starred review
“It's an ambitious sprawl of a book, splendidly extreme in its magnitude, yet always elegant; a defence of complicated thinking and embodied life.”
―Guardian

“[Tenderness is] an inspired fusion of fact and fiction. . . . Seriously brilliant. . . . ambitious, and delicious.”
―Kirkus Reviews

"A profoundly moving, luminous novel revolving around D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tenderness is an endlessly insightful meditation on art, politics, betrayal and the nature of intimacy.."
—"Waterstones Says"

Praise for Alison MacLeod:

“MacLeod is dazzlingly good at evoking a whole life through a single snapshot and at bending and stretching her prose as she moves between an impressive range of narrative personae.”
—Guardian
“MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A writer of great descriptive power. . . . Like her modernist forebears, Macleod knows that life and death, the terrible and the mundane always co-exist—her genius lies in illustrating these truths while simultaneously spinning a bona fide page-turner.”
—Daily Mail
“[MacLeod’s] grasp of emotions, and history of art as well as politics, lend depth and charge. . . . [There is also] the sensuality of MacLeod's prose, whether dealing with art, desire or love; and her uncanny way of allowing us to experience the thought processes of her characters as if they are traversing our own brain synapses.”
—Independent on Sunday
“MacLeod's fictions are modern indeed. They are fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts.”
—Guardian
“Full of simmering tension, resentment and unexpressed passion. . . . [Unexploded is a] bold, cleverly told story from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing.”
—Observer

“Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds . . . and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling.”
—Helen Dunmore, author of Inside the Wave

“Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; [Unexploded is] a novel of staggering elegance and beauty.”
—Independent