The Voice and the Echo

The Voice and the Echo follows five friends: Marcus, Clive, Clara, Dave and Mike, who produce a university newspaper, The Student Voice, in the north of England. From their meeting in the mid-1960s, we follow their lives through all the major news events of the following forty years, from the swinging Sixties to industrial unrest in the Seventies and Eighties, and institutional racism and corruption within the police and tabloid press. Marcus finds himself shrugging off his student politics and embracing Thatcherism as his career takes off at the Daily Echo. On his watch, his staff are bullied, stories are invented and manipulated, telephones are hacked, and policemen are bribed. He shuns his former friends and attempts to undermine Dave, now a junior minister in the Blair government. Meanwhile, easy-going Clive Parkhouse joins a Yorkshire paper, edited by Mike. He witnesses the miners’ strike firsthand and the one-sided reporting in the media. Clive resigns and develops a career at a radio station, but following the death of his wife, he drinks heavily, loses his job and steals from his daughter’s inheritance. He collaborates with Lucy Kwame, a newspaper reporter, on an investigation into police racism. He is unaware that Lucy is Clara Tomlin’s daughter. Clara is unmarried, and Lucy does not know the identity of her father. Giving a gritty, honest account of social unrest from the 1960s onwards, The Voice and The Echo will appeal to anyone familiar with or may have witnessed these events, or those interested in learning more about the period.

BJ Bulckley is a self-taught writer. He grew up in the Midlands and Yorkshire and currently lives in Hertfordshire.