The award-winning author of The Mulberry Empire brings us a sweeping chronicle of ordinary lives profoundly shaped by both the subtleties of everyday experience and the larger forces of history.In 1974, the Sellers family is transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will echo through the years to come as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover--set off by two seemingly inconsequential but ultimately indelible acts of cruelty--that will erupt, full-blown, two decades later.…
"Again, this is a bit indulgent because it’s set in Crosspool which is the suburb I live in. It’s very much about what this part of suburban Sheffield was like in the 1980s, and all the secrets behind people’s front doors. It’s a bit uncanny to read when it’s that close to home, and it also rings quite true. This is the affluent side of Sheffield, so in The Northern Clemency it’s the part of Sheffield where the man who is keeping the power station running during the miners’ strike lives. His son is one of the demonstrators who protested with the miners, though they didn’t want his help because he was a posh boy. It’s about middle-class insecurity and duplicity really. It’s about people lying to each other. It’s a little bit depressing, the reality behind the front doors of what life in Britain is like. In the middle of Britain there is the middle class. The middle of Britain isn’t the very rich people, it isn’t the very poor people, it is the middle class. The book shows that the middle class put a lot of effort into making it appear that their lives are well sorted out and they’re comfortable. The neat little rows of suburban houses are all about looking organised and being organised. In fact, often, behind the front doors, their households are full of arguments and pretence and upsets. The book is a bit uncomfortable, but it is fiction, it’s a novel, so it’s less uncomfortable to read than some of the more factual books I’ve chosen. Also, it works for people of a particular age: you have to have been a teenager or a bit older in the 1980s for the book to really work for you. But all these books, taken together, help create an image of what I think a lot of life in Britain is about today. It’s about people driving too much and getting too fat; it’s about life being shit in the poorest parts and that getting worse; it’s about the mundane reality of a motorway system and a set of trunk roads that holds it all physically together; it’s about a sense of great insecurity as to just how firm the concrete supporting our social system really is; and it is about how we act and live our lives as if everything is OK, when so very often we are only just managing to hold it all together and keep up appearances, while slowly sinking into debt and despondency. There is a huge amount of humour in all these books and quite a lot of sarcasm, but there is also an underlying sense that this is not how we should be living right now."
