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From the author of The Mulberry Empire comes a short, delicious, rather disorienting novel about an indexer who wakes up one morning to a Dear John letter informing him his wife has left him... 'My wife had gone and I didn't know where she had gone. It would have been terrible if I had liked her but I only loved her. 'John is an indexer, and a bloody good one at that. He lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden, and has a beautiful wife, Janet. (Yes, yes, they are called Janet and John. They know. ) But lately, things have begun to go wrong. Thanks to his flawless index for 'Haddock: The Story of the Fish Which Changed the World', John has become typecast, and a commission for an index for 'Squid Through the Ages in Poetry and Prose' swiftly followed. And to cap it all, he's woken up with a terrible case of the hiccups, and Janet has left him... Wonderfully funny and light, but ultimately very moving, The Fit is English comic writing at its best, from one of the most talented young novelists at work today.

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 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-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.