ABSTRACT
Born in 1930, Barry Unsworth grew up in a Durham mining community and, as he has emphasised in interviews, he was the first in his family to escape the necessary drudgery of the pit. After studying at Manchester University and completing his national service, he spent much of the late 1950s and 1960s working and travelling in Greece and Turkey He taught English in universities in both countries and both have provided the settings for some of his novels. Most of Unsworth's early fiction, with exceptions like The Greeks Have a Word for It, is set in England. His very first novel, The Partnership, takes place amid the tawdry tourism of 1960s Cornwall and focuses on two men, Foley and Moss, partners in a business catering to tourist tastes, whose alliance begins to crumble under the pressures of hidden desires. Unsworth's major achievements are two works published within a few years of one another in the early 1990s.
