This image is the cover for the book I Won't Call You Again

I Won't Call You Again

This is the story of a formative period in the lives of two young people in Northern England: a student who is facing the possibility of leaving the city of his birth to study at a university, and a pragmatic shop-worker from the same neighbourhood with ambitions of her own, leading in a different direction. Although surprisingly mature for their age, their emotional inexperience becomes evident when they are unexpectedly thrown together. The saga develops around the close-knit families of the two central characters, their friends (who are a mixture of students and local workers) and outsiders who bring both good and bad influences to bear on their lives. The main setting is a decaying, industrial city during the winter months of 1971/72, and various historical threads, such as music and fashion, have been woven into the story to provide a sense of social atmosphere. It was a time when parents could recollect their memories of World War II, when people relied on buses to get them to and from work, when milk was delivered to the door, the call of the ‘rag-and-bone’ man was only beginning to fade from the street, and when face-to-face communication still reigned supreme, untroubled by the technological era about to descend on the world.

Thomas Henchard

After a lifetime of reading a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, Thomas Henchard was researching some material from his own past when he was struck by the idea of making his own contribution to literature by writing about the fictional lives of a family from a period in modern history, with the emphasis on the younger generation. The result was the novel I Won’t Call You Again – The Old Year. A sequel called I Won’t Call You Again – The New Year, and two further novels (Don’t Get Stuck on a Sandbank and Bring Ten Naira!) are in progress. Although born in West Yorkshire, the author spent a large part of his early childhood in Malaysia and Hong Kong, and he has also been an expatriate worker in West Africa and the Middle East. At the time of writing, he lives in Lincolnshire with his wife.

Austin Macauley Publishers