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Michael McCarthy won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism. The Man on the Mountain A babyboomer love story by Michael McCarthy What was the essence of the babyboomers? Were they just the luckiest and most privileged generation ever to walk the earth? For they certainly were that, enjoying everything from unheard-of security and unprecedented freedoms to an old age which for many ended in riches, leaving them the object of angry resentment from the generations who followed and had a harder path through life. Yet when they started out, the babyboomers also had purpose: they wanted to make the world a better place – at least, the best of them did. Gideon Horrocks and Graham Blenkinsop were two such, radical students together at the end of the sixties: Horrocks the Marxist revolutionary and Blenkinsop the underground chemist manufacturing that most archetypal of babyboomer hallucinogens, LSD. But when, a decade after university, the two men reunite to make LSD on a scale big enough to flood all of Europe, in an isolated old house on the Lancashire moors, Horrocks has lost his radical beliefs, and uses his share of the money that rolls in to start a fashionable restaurant, which becomes the most glamorous and successful restaurant in the North of England. On New Year’s Eve 1980, Horrocks is giving a party in a wine bar to celebrate his success when he drunkenly intervenes in a police arrest and is himself arrested for obstruction. He resolves to take revenge on the young officer who detains him, WPC Claire Sowerby, a probationary member of the local drug squad – yet instead, he falls in love with her. Unknown to him, however, the squad of which Claire Sowerby is a member is on his trail, and it is under these circumstances that they come together, two people who have both been damaged and shaped by great unhappiness in their pasts, and who, wholly unexpectedly, find in each other the possibility of a happy future. But circumstances are closing in... Set in the early years of Thatcher’s Britain, in the industrial Lancashire of the nineteen-eighties with unemployment rapidly rising, The Man On The Mountain tells two gripping and interlocking stories – one about the fate of the most extraordinary of generations, and the other about the power of love to reopen even the most tightly closed of human hearts. |
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Michael McCarthy is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and the natural world, and has won a string of awards for his work as Environment Correspondent of The Times and Environment Editor of The Independent. As an author he has written Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo (2009) and The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) both of which were widely praised, with the latter book shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize. Most recently he has written (with Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren) The Consolation of Nature – Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (2020) which was chosen as one of The Guardian’s Nature Books of The Year. This is his first novel.. |
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