* Shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize.* Beginning in 1974 & 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 & 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 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother`s public cruelty & the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head 20 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 19th-century Russian novels, The Northern Clemency shows Philip Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life.