Clayhanger is the first volume in the trilogy which consists of Hilda Lessways and These Twain.

Set like The Old Wives' Tale in teh Five Towns, Clayhanger in a careful evocation on a boy growing to manhood during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and includes an unforgettable portrait on an autocratic father.

'Clayhanger is one of the most attractive heroes in twentieth-century fiction. Bennett, who believed inordinately in the interestingness of ordinary things and ordinary people, was never more successful in revealing the interestingness of an apparently ordinary man than Edwin Clayhanger' Walter Allen in The English Novel