‘One of the modern writers I like is John King. I thought The Football Factory, which they’ve made into a film, was excellent; he’s a very fine writer. I tend to read a lot of writers from Israel – David Grossman, Amos Oz – there’s plenty of good stuff at the moment. I’ve just come to the end of a long novel by Oz, a story of life and death, that’s simply wonderful, but I’d recommend his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness; it’s translated by Nicholas de Lange, who is first rate.’
The Nottingham Books
A MAN OF HIS TIME concludes a series of Sillitoe’s novels and stories – beginning with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning–that feature various members of the Seaton family. Below is a complete list of Sillitoe’s Nottingham books.
1. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
2. Key to the Door (1961)
3. Raw Material (1972)
4. The Storyteller (1979)
5. Down from the Hill (1984)
6. The Open Door (1989)
7. Leonard’s War (1991)
8. The Broken Chariot (1998)
9. Birthday (2001)
10. New and Collected Stories (2003)
11. A Man of His Time (2004)
For anyone wanting to discover more about the man who inspired the fictional Ernest Burton, Sillitoe’s novelistic memoir Raw Material (1972) and his compelling and beautifully written autobiography Life Without Armour (1995) are well worth seeking out.
Have You Read?
Other titles by Alan Sillitoe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A hard-drinking, hard-fighting young rebel of a man, he knows what he wants and he’s sharp enough to get it. And before long, his carryings-on with a couple of married women are local gossip. But then one evening he meets a young girl in a pub, and Arthur’s life begins to look less simple.
Alan Sillitoe’s classic novel of the 1950s is a story of timeless significance.
‘A novel of today with a freshness and raw fury that makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party’
Daily Telegraph
‘His writing has real experience in it and an instinctive accuracy that never loses its touch. His book has a glow about it as though he had plugged it into some basic source of the working-class spirit’
Guardian
‘Brilliant … if he never writes anything more, he has assured himself a place in the history of the English novel’
New Yorker
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)
Smith is an incorrigible and defiant young rebel, inhabiting a no-man’s land of institutionalized Borstal. Watched over by an indifferent sunlight, as his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frostbitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running.
‘Graphic, tough, outspoken, informal’
The Times
‘A beautiful piece of work, confirming Sillitoe as a writer of unusual spirit and great promise’
Guardian
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’
Mail on Sunday
‘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’
Yorkshire Post
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’
Allan Massie
‘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’
Daily Telegraph
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.
The Web Detective
http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk
The city’s official site.
http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk
Nottingham news engine.
http://www.cressbrook.co.uk/matlock.html
Tourist information site for Matlock.
http://www.raleighbikes.com/home.html
Raleigh Bikes of Nottingham’s website – although the cycle factory on Triumph Road has now been demolished.
http://www.nottinghamgallery.co.uk
This site offers a photographic survey of Nottingham past and present.
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 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
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published by Flamingo 2004
Copyright © Alan Sillitoe 2004
PS section copyright © Travis Elborough 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Alan Sillitoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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