
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008. An epic chronicle of the last twenty years of British life from the Booker shortlisted & Granta Best of Young British novelist Philip Hensher. Beginning in 1974 & ending with the fading of Thatchers government in 1996 The Northern Clemency is Philip Henshers epic portrait of an entire era a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people & history on the move. Set in Sheffield it charts the relationship between two families: Malcolm & Katherine Glover & their three children; & 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 & their children in particular ten-year-old Tim Glover who never quite recovers from a moment of his mothers public cruelty & 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- & industrial-based economy into a new world of shops restaurants & 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 & 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.