Description

It was an extraordinary love affair, between an arrogant and cynical drugs baron and an idealistic young policewoman – in fact, it was more than extraordinary, it was impossible. It could not ever have a happy ending. It was doomed before it began. It could only take place because of mutual ignorance, with both the man and the woman each not knowing a vital piece of information about the other. Yet when in the end it happened, against all odds it was a true union of two hearts.

The remarkable love story of Gideon Horrocks and WPC Clare Sowerby begins with an arrest – when she detains him for obstruction, for drunkenly interfering in a police operation on New Year’s Eve. She sees Horrocks then merely for what he appears to be – the flamboyant, loud-mouthed owner of a hugely fashionable and successful restaurant. She has no idea that he is one of the main organisers of a scheme which over the previous three years has flooded all of Europe with millions of doses of LSD, the psychedelic drug, and that he has financed his restaurant from the proceeds. But Horrocks is also ignorant of something vital. He knows that Clare Sowerby is a probationary member of the local drug squad, and sets out to seduce her as a way taking revenge for his arrest – but he has no idea whatsoever that his security has been compromised, and that the squad of which she is a member is on the trail of his LSD operation. And it is under these circumstances that their encounter deepens into love, when each becomes aware of a great unhappiness in the other’s past, and they find, wholly unexpectedly, the possibility of a happy future together.

Yet all the time, events are closing in, and an explosive climax is coming…
Told with remorseless pace, and set in the early years of Thatcher’s Britain, in the industrial Lancashire of the 1980s with unemployment rapidly rising, The Man On The Mountain recounts two gripping and interlocking stories – one about the fate of the most extraordinary of generations, the babyboomers, and the other about the power of love to reopen even the most tightly-closed of human hearts. And they form a tragedy that is unforgettable.

Michael McCarthy has won numerous awards for his environmental journalism as the Environment Correspondent of The Times and the longstanding Environment Editor of The Independent. His book The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, Britain’s premier nature writing award, and also for the Richard Jefferies prize. His novel Fergus The Silent (2022) won the 2023 Creative Writing Prize of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, with the chairman of the judges describing it as “wonderful.” This is his second novel.