SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008. An epic
chronicle of the last twenty years of British life from
the Booker shortlisted and Granta Best of Young British
novelist, Philip Hensher. Beginning in 1974 and ending
with the fading of Thatcher's government in 1996, 'The
Northern Clemency' is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of
an entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of
ordinary people and history on the move. Set in
Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two
families: Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three
children; and their neighbours, the Sellers family,
newly arrived from London so that Bernie can pursue his
job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move
in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has
left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The
consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the
lives of both couples and their children, in particular
ten-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a
moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused
taunting of fifteen-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood
crises that will come to a head twenty years later.In
the background, England is changing: from a
manufacturing- and industrial-based economy into a new
world of shops, restaurants and service industries, a
shift particularly marked in the North with the miners'
strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on both
families. Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of
relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian
novels, 'The Northern Clemency' shows Philip Hensher to
be one of our greatest chroniclers of English
life. |
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