Birthday

Birthday

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

The long-anticipated sequel to Alan Sillitoe's bestselling classic 1950s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Arthur and Brian Seaton are heading back to their hometown, Nottingham, some forty-odd years after the close of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The brothers plan to surprise Brian's first love, Jenny Tuxford, on her seventieth birthday. Arthur, the notorious lothario, still has some of his old spark, but it has been hampered by domestic life and his wife's recent cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, Brian, now a failed novelist but successful television writer living in London, is struggling with dissatisfaction and emotional regrets. He and Jenny had fooled around in their teenage years—a lot of heavy petting through complicated clothing on her parents' settee—but Jenny ended up marrying someone else. Now that Jenny's husband has passed away, will sparks fly between her and Brian again? It is clear that the Nottingham...
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Travels in Nihilon

Travels in Nihilon

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

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 a new guidebook about the peculiar, unexplored land and its all-powerful leader, President Nil. Adam, Benjamin, Jaquiline, Edgar, and Richard attempt to gather information—but find themselves swept up by a nation turned upside down. As they navigate their way to the capital through artificial mist created by President Nil to disorient his people, the writers are stopped by ordinary citizens whom they quickly discover cannot be trusted. Adam accidentally starts a ground war, Benjamin is forced to buy a car, and Jaquiline discovers that robbery is not only legal, but encouraged. The researchers, who arrived as tourists, will find that although it is easy...
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Alligator Playground

Alligator Playground

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

From one of England's greatest living writers comes a new collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life's great playground.Relationships -- clandestine and legitimate -- are the theme: boorish chaps and their stalwart women ululate and hum; marriages and infidelities tick-tock and tick over; Fitzrovian passion flares; strong men turn to drink. Love, sex, loss, are captured in Mr Sillitoe's inimitable style.As well as the general theme of the union of the sexes, we have inspired insights into birth, boyhood, bereavement and aloneness in a collection of perfectly narrated observations, in which the reader participates in each extraordinary experience.
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Alligator Playground

Alligator Playground

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

From one of England's greatest living writers comes a new collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life's great playground.Relationships -- clandestine and legitimate -- are the theme: boorish chaps and their stalwart women ululate and hum; marriages and infidelities tick-tock and tick over; Fitzrovian passion flares; strong men turn to drink. Love, sex, loss, are captured in Mr Sillitoe's inimitable style.As well as the general theme of the union of the sexes, we have inspired insights into birth, boyhood, bereavement and aloneness in a collection of perfectly narrated observations, in which the reader participates in each extraordinary experience.
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The Death of William Posters

The Death of William Posters

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

A sociopolitical misadventure from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Frank Dawley is a working-class escapee. After twelve years of spiritual nullification at a factory in Nottingham, five years in an alienating marriage, and two burdensome kids, Frank is finally free. He has quit his job, burned his possessions, and sold his car, and is hitching a ride to wherever the road will take him. Haunting Frank's physical and existential travels is a ubiquitous inscription painted on nearly every street corner in England: BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Who is this Bill Posters, who is so relentlessly hounded by the authorities? To Frank, Bill—or William—becomes a symbol of the servile proletariat, the "put-upon dreg" whose hollow ideologies have bombarded Frank throughout his entire life. As an act of resistance, Frank becomes determined to reject—even to kill—the William...
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

This cult classic of working class life in post-war Nottingham follows the exploits of rebellious factory worker Arthur Seaton and is introduced by Richard Bradford. Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A hard-drinking, hard-fighting hooligan, he knows what he wants, and he's sharp enough to get it. Before long, his carryings-on with a couple of married women become the stuff of local gossip. But then one evening he meets a young girl and life begins to look less simple... First published in 1958, 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' achieved instant critical acclaim and helped to establish Alan Sillitoe as one of the greatest British writers of his generation. The film of the novel, starring Albert Finney, transformed British cinema and was much imitated.
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A Tree on Fire

A Tree on Fire

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

The second novel in award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe's William Posters Trilogyis an existential investigation of protest and revolution in 1960s North Africa and England Jewish dilettante Myra Bassingfield returns to England from Gibraltar with her four-week-old son. Frank Dawley, the child's father and the anarchist antihero of The Death of William Posters, has disappeared into the African desert, where he is fighting with the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) for Algerian independence against French troops. Greeting Myra quayside as she disembarks from the ship is Frank's friend, Albert Handley, an idealistic painter living in a chaotic house in Linconshire with seven kids, a bulldog, six cats, and two au pair girls. Albert's brother, John, is determined to break from the family and he sets off for Algeria to track Frank down—but not before burning the Handley house to the ground. The Handley...
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Key to the Door

Key to the Door

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

An existential saga of working-class life in a British factory town and military service in the torrid jungles of the Far East from award-winning, bestselling author Alan SillitoeKey to the Door turns away from the boisterous pursuits of Arthur Seaton made infamous in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and focuses instead on the quieter rebellions of his older brother, Brian. Brian's childhood and adolescence in the grimy streets of Nottingham are shaped by the Depression-era struggles of his family, the life and culture of the factory town, and the love and bullying of his iron-willed grandfather and erratic father. When Brian reaches adulthood, he frequents the local pubs, works hard at a cardboard factory, and runs into a sticky situation with a woman named Pauline that obliges him to marry her. Soon though, he is conscripted for the postwar occupation of Malaya, and his true colors begin to show. Brian declares that he only wears his...
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