Moving from the gas-flares of Teesside, to marine adventures in the
South Atlantic, Hemispheres is a salutary and searing debut novel for
anyone who enjoyed Kes and The Northern Clemency
Growing up in a family of pub landlords, Danny spends his youth in Thatcher’s
Britain in the company of angry, disaffected men. His father, Yan, has not returned
from the Falklands War, and Danny and his mother have no idea whether he is dead
or has deserted. But Yan is very much alive: half a world away, on another rugged
coast, a drunken game of poker sets him and a rag-tag band of deserters off on a
punishing journey across the southern hemisphere.
Years later, Yan returns – whip-thin, weathered, and, he maintains, dying of cancer.
For all his conflicted emotions, Danny is unable to walk away from the answers Yan
can give him, from a last chance to understand his father and to say a final goodbye.
Yan relates his story of migration in the patterned language of their shared passion for
birding; the whirling of gulls and guillemots, ravens and herons, nightjars and
lapwings...
Hemispheres is a gloriously ambitious debut novel of family, destiny, nature and
coming home
