A novel of ambition, about a man who rises from the most humble of beginnings in Manchester and reaches the very top in politics.

Hamer Shawcross is born into a poor but aspirational working-class family in Manchester. Studious and hard-working, he becomes a socialist activist, goes into politics and rises to become part of the privileged upper classes he began by opposing. Hamer's trajectory is mirrored by the rise of the Labour movement in Britain from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. This wonderfully perceptive study of a career politician serves as a telling elegy for the Labour Party.

The tragedy of the novel rests not just in the arc it traces from the heroic era of the proletariat in Peterloo to the midnight of the twentieth century, but in the missed encounters and lost possibilities embodied in every Hamer Shawcross' TLS.