The Litten Path

The Litten Path is a sweeping debut that provides an intimate view of the miners' strike of 1984 as it unfolds through the eyes of two families on either side of the struggle. The Litten Path is a novel of the strike as much as about the strike, knitting the intense emotional and political terrain of the famous dispute with the stark landscape of a small town in South Yorkshire. Written in a tough yet lyrical northern vernacular, The Litten Path is grimly honest and tender, comic and painful, a story of the clash between the urban and the rural, class frictions and the pressures of family. It is about what happens when a decision is made, when one cannot turn back. The Litten Path begins on the eve of the vote to strike in March 1984, to November of that painful year. Taking in controversial events such as the Battle of Orgreave. Clarke's exceptional debut is peppered with pickets, collieries and the sunless landscapes that form the inner fabric of its people in a Britain forever lost in time