‘Graphic, tough, outspoken, informal’
‘A beautiful piece of work, confirming Sillitoe as a writer of unusual spirit and great promise’
The Broken Chariot (1998)
When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents — as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation — took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England.
Through the years which follow, Herbert is held together by his desire for revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, out there, a new world beckons.
And when he’s seventeen, he steals away from school and becomes a different person.
‘Sillitoe’s sheer narrative drive manages to suspend most of the reader’s disbelief. This is an old-fashioned novel — technically conventional, pulling off the usual tricks of character and motivation — but oddly alive in a way that a great deal of modern fiction, written by those as yet unborn when Sillitoe began his career, patently is not’
‘The Broken Chariot explores familiar themes for Sillitoe: working in factories, drinking in pubs and chasing women in post-war Nottingham. But the writer has found a fresh, new approach to his specialist subject; one that again allows him to tackle the issue of class in a way that is often surprising and always entertaining’
Birthday (2001)
Birthday is the long-awaited sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Four decades on from the novel which was at the forefront of the new wave of British literature, we rediscover the Seaton brothers: older, certainly; wiser — possibly not.
‘Sequels are seldom better than the original but this one is’
‘There are parallels here with Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils — another old man’s book about old age. But it is well worth reading, both for its evocation of a vanished way of working-class life, and for its steadfast depiction of the horrors of old age and the valour and comradeship that can, in part at least, redeem it’
If You Loved This, You’ll Like …
Silvertown
by Melanie McGrath
An evocative novelistic portrait of London’s now vanished East End — a world of docks, disease, grim tenements, bread and dripping and the dogs — dominated by McGrath’s testy grandmother, Jenny Fulcher.
Ulverton
by Adam Thorpe
This panoramic, ingenious novel chronicles 350 years in the life of a rural English village.
Living
by Henry Green
Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, Green’s 1929 novel grittily and entertainingly parallels the lives of the workers and the owners.
Another World
by Pat Barker
Barker’s powerful novel looks at a family haunted by events dating back to the First World War.
About the Author
Alan Sillitoe left school at fourteen to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. In 1958, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.
Other Works
Also by Alan Sillitoe
FICTION
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
The General
Key to the Door
The Ragman’s Daughter
The Death of William Posters
A Tree on Fire
Guzman, Go Home
A Start in Life
Travels in Nihilon
Raw Material
Men, Women and Children
The Flame of Life
The Widower’s Son
The Storyteller
The Second Chance and Other Stories
Her Victory
The Lost Flying Boat
Down From the Hill
Life Goes On
Out of the Whirlpool
The Open Door
Last Loves
Leonard’s War
Snowstop
Collected Stories
Alligator Playground
The Broken Chariot
The German Numbers Woman
Birthday
NON-FICTION
Life Without Armour (Autobiography)
POETRY
The Rats and Other Poems
A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems
Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems
Storm and Other Poems
Snow on the North Side of Lucifer
Sun Before Departure
Tides and Stone Walls
Collected Poems
PLAYS
All Citizens are Soldiers (with Ruth Fainlight)
Three Plays
ESSAYS
Mountains and Caverns
FOR CHILDREN
The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim
Big John and the Stars
The Incredible Fencing Fleas
Marmalade Jim on the Farm
Marmalade Jim and the Fox