Stephen Baker: Hemispheres
Stephen Baker: Hemispheres, published by Atlantic
Description
Set on the windswept North-East coast of England, against the ragged industrial landscape of the Tees estuary, Hemispheres is the vivid and painful story of a son’s reconnection with his long-absent father.
Moving from the gas-flares of Teesside, to marine adventures in the South Atlantic, Hemispheres is a gloriously ambitious first novel about family, destiny, nature and coming home. Set between 1982 and 2000, it tells the story of Yan and his son, Danny. Growing up in a family of publicans, Danny spends his youth surrounded by the angry, disaffected men of Thatcher’s Britain. 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 hemispheres.
Twenty 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. The two men try and find a way to uncover the complicated feelings that have taken root during their lives apart. And what binds them, providing a refrain across the years, is a shared love of birds and birdwatching. Yan relates his story of migration in the language of birding, the whirling of gulls and guillemots, ravens and herons, nightjars and lapwings…
Hemispheres Front Cover
About the Author
STEVEN BAKER was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1969, and now lives in Derbyshire. Hemispheres is his first novel.
