Alan Sillitoe

Over forty short stories spanning the career of England’s most acclaimed postwar writer—including the iconic “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”
 
This comprehensive collection of short fiction from bestselling British author Alan Sillitoe mixes aggression with humor, and common working-class men with extraordinary twists of fate. It compiles works selected from the master storyteller’s...

The strange odyssey of an Essex working man who exchanges England for Algeria. Frank Dawley is obsessed with revolt and revolutionaries so, abandoning his wife and infant son, he crosses the Mediterranean into the nightmare terrain of Algeria where a colonial army and a national guerrilla force are in a fierce fight.

"This novel, filled with minor imperfections, the scabs of real scars, describes the arc of a man bursting free from the deathly grip of a dying world. Frank Dawley is a workingman alienated from machine, wife, and finally, at the close of this adventure, Western society. He is haunted by "William Posters," a projection of the last resistance to the debilitating life of the Midlands. Were it not for his politics, we could call Dawley "Lawrencian,"...

An outrageously funny novel of adventure, sex, corruption, and crime from one of the greatest British authors of the twentieth century. Michael Cullen is proud to be a bastard. His first memories are of the war, when his mother welcomed every soldier in Britain into her house, and young Michael hid beneath her bed to let the rocking of the springs lull him to sleep. By the time he's eighteen, he's got a pregnant girlfriend, and is staring down a long...

Raised by a career soldier, a working class Englishman tries to find his place -- both in and out of uniform -- in this compelling novel of love and war.

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...

A suspense novel of drugs, love, cyphers, and sailors from the bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.   A blind Royal Air Force veteran becomes entangled in a high-seas heroin heist in this gripping adventure from one of Britain's most renowned postwar writers. Though Henry cannot see, he is able to view the world through the radio waves, eavesdropping on global affairs and secret transmissions with his mastery of Morse...

Her 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 back in place.

During a war a General intercepts an orchestra and imprisons them in a barn where he and the orchestra leader debate the major issues of life. Eventually, won over, the General releases them and is in turn arrested by his own soldiers for disobeying orders.

"Ernest Cotgrave discovers early on in life that he has the gift of spellbinding people by telling stories. After his hasty marriage he begins a career of professional entertaining, working pubs, clubs common rooms and miners' institutes with his tales."--Goodreads