A wonderful historical novel from one of our best loved and most prolific writersAs a young man Ernest Burton was a bold and reckless journeyman blacksmith, seducing all young girls he comes across. We watch him grow to become a master Blacksmith, and a tyrannical father of eight who refuses even...
A top-rate novel of drugs, love and treachery from an author at the height of his powers.
From one of Britain’s leading writers comes a biting satire about a country founded on Nihilism and a government gone mad Nihilon is a country where honesty is outlawed, drunk driving is mandatory, and nihilism reigns supreme. Five researchers are sent into the midst of this chaos to compile ...
Renowned for the themes of class and authority that run throughout his fiction, this collection of fiction by Alan Sillitoe contains his greatest short stories, including his early classic The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
From The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner to his more recent A Man of His Time, Alan Sillitoe remains one of England's greatest living authors. A Start in Life is Sillitoe's ninth novel and follows the fortunes of Michael Cullen, who describes himself as ''a bastard'' at the start of the no...
Alan Sillitoe is best known for THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER. In RAW MATERIAL we meet Sillitoe's impoverished Midlands forebearers and learn why Sillitoe believes family relationships are the basis of all security, love and perhaps all truth. For him, these relationships are the art...
Arthur and Brian Seaton, one with an ailing wife, one with an emotional knapsack of failure and success, are on their way to Jenny's 70th birthday party. But there is still pleasure; and still pain.
Sillitoe is one of the great underrated British novelists of the Twentieth Century. He seems to have fallen out of vogue somewhat but did make a splash with "the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning." Though I don't really know a great deal about British wo...
Frank Dawley is 26. He is sick of his job his house his marriage his life. In this novel the author brilliantly captures that feeling of wanting to escape from the shackles of conventional society. The break for freedom that is so exhilarating. One that so few of us have the nerve to attempt. Car...
As snow falls over the peaks, twelve people, nine men and three women, head towards the comfort of the remote White Cavalier Hotel. Each has their own psychological baggage and they are trapped with in this haven with a terrorist.
Part Two Of Two PartsHER VICTORY is a fine achievement, as was THE WIDOWER'S SON, another novel from Sillitoe's more recent period. Both deal with those times when one feels overloaded with the accumulated burdens of life. Sillitoe's characters perform a chiropractic function: they put things bac...
God knows what the customs thought when so many sportsmen and hunters started coming through. It was as if caribou had become the blight of Jersey, and stags were stampeding around on Guernsey. They just loved tomatoes, I could have told them if they’d cared to ask. I made six trips altogether, f...
They took the hard route out, the long march, the half-possible. To look down made him dizzy, to look up promised a premature death by exhaustion – which was better, he thought, scrambling up a few more feet, than a bullet up your arse or the red cock on your shoulders. Tilt your head back and th...
He’ll be on his way back now from the dole-office. Tell ’im to get five Woodbines and bring ’alf a pound o’ fish for our suppers. Go on, run, he’ll gi’ you ha’penny if you see him.” Brian gathered what brother was available, and did as he was told. Vera had been glad to see the back of Seaton tha...