A Kestrel for a Knave
10 best books like A Kestrel for a Knave (Barry Hines): I'm the King of the Castle, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Owl Service, Billy Liar, The Nargun and the Stars, Smith, Headlong Hall, Cue for Treason, Novel on Yellow Paper (Revived Modern Classic), GB84
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140034919 |
‘I didn’t want you to come here.’ So says the note that the boy Edmund Hooper passes to Charles Kingshaw upon his arrival at Warings. But young Kingshaw and his mother have come to live with Hooper and his father in the ugly, isolated Victorian house for good. To Hooper, Kingshaw is an intruder, a...
| Author | Alan Sillitoe |
| ISBN | 0452269091 |
To Arthur Seaton, Key worker on a lathe in a Nottingham cycle factory, life is one long battle with authority. You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.
And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior...
| Author | Alan Garner |
| ISBN | 0152056181 |
Something is scratching around in the attic above Alison's room. Yet the only thing up there is a stack of grimy old plates. Alison and her stepbrother, Roger, discover that the flowery patterns on the plates, when traced onto paper, can be fitted together to create owls-owls that disappear when no one...
| Author | Keith Waterhouse |
| ISBN | 0140017836 |
Billy Liar captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand...
Few books had as profound an impact on me when I was growing up. This haunting tale of a lonely boy discovering an ancient stone Nargun, a creature straight from Aboriginal mythology, on his uncle's rural property had me spellbound. It still does. Wrightson, who died in 2010, was criticised for using...
| Author | Leon Garfield |
| ISBN | 0374467625 |
This brilliant, picaresque novel follows the adventures of an illiterate young ragamuffin known only as Smith. Smith picks the pocket of a stranger, only to witness immediately the strangers murder. Smiths booty from the theft is an Important Document, no doubt worth quite a lot to somebody, which...
| Author | Thomas Love Peacock |
| ISBN | 1406908452 |
Excerpt: ...mould, and covering the whole with an elegant stratum of turf. Squire Headlong caught with avidity at this suggestion; and, as he had always a store of gunpowder in the house, for the accommodation of himself and his shooting visitors, and for the supply of a small battery of cannon, which...
Fleeing from the evil Sir Philip Morton, Peter Brownrigg finds himself on the wrong side of the law - and on the run. As he makes his way to London, he meets Kit, another runaway, and the two decide to stick together. With luck on their side, they find jobs as apprentices to William Shakespeare, but a chance...
| Author | Stevie Smith |
| ISBN | 0811212394 |
Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.
About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word...
| Author | David Peace |
| ISBN | 0571221742 |
David Peace makes a powerful, angry, ominous, and forbidding monument of a novel of the ’84 UK Miner’s strike (which was an equivalent labor defeat to the ’85 Pan Am strike, but more violent and filled with drama.). If you aren’t in the right frame of mind, this frantic and wonderful read might...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 1557132844 |
Afternoon Men follows the trivial encounters and idle pastimes of the social set through William Atwater. With a glee in upending pretense that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell attacks artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the glamorous life.Afternoon...
| Author | Arnold Bennett |
| ISBN | 0140009973 |
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British writer. He went to work for his father but was unhappy working for his father and earning very little money. The theme of parental miserliness occurs in his works. At 21 he went to London to clerk for a solicitor. He then began working for a magazine called Women....
| Author | Andrew O'Hagan |
| ISBN | 0156029677 |
Growing up on the Scottish Isle of Bute, Maria Tambini is a young girl with dreams of escape from her Italian immigrant family. When her amazing singing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom.
But even as Maria is celebrating...
| Author | Stan Barstow |
| ISBN | 0140016694 |
All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid, and as their relationship grows and changes, he comes to terms the hard way with adult life and what it really means to love. The influence...
| Author | Julian Maclaren-Ross |
| ISBN | 0141187115 |
An interesting novel set in 1939 in the months before the start of war. It opens a window of an England now mostly disappeared; landladies, jobs easy to get and lots of smoking!!. However the themes of love and loss are eternal. The shadow of war is ever present. The main character isn't likeable but the...
The north of England in the 1950s, Arthur (not that other great Northern bellower given to us by Alan Sillitoe) wants out of the flat on your back, working yourself to death, working class lifestyle that he was born in to and the only way he can see to escape is through excelling at sport. He's got some physicality...
In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage,...
| Author | Colin MacInnes |
| ISBN | 0749005408 |
London, 1958—Soho, Notting Hill... a world of smoky jazz clubs, coffee bars and hip hang-outs in the center of London's emerging youth culture. The young and restless—the Absolute Beginners—were creating a world as different as they dared from the traditional image of England's green and...
| Author | C. Day-Lewis |
| ISBN | 0435120018 |
“This is a really super story—I shold know, I wrote it. My name is George, and I’m Ted’s second-in-command: Ted is is centre-forward of the Junior XI at King’s School in Otterbury and a first class chap. He’s the leader of our company, and the story began with our battle against Toppy’s...
| Author | Gillian Rubinstein |
| ISBN | 0689806027 |
After Tod's father abandoned the family, his mother moved them into their grandmother's crowded house. Overwhelmed at school, Tod finds himself lagging behind his classmates and becoming entangled in a destructive gang. After Tod compassionately buries a dead fox, a fox-spirit offers him the chance...
| Author | Anthony Buckeridge |
| ISBN | 0755113683 |
When Jennings arrives at Linbury Court Preparatory School as a new boy, he soon discovers how much he has to learn, especially when the other boys seem to be talking in a different language! Spivish ozard! But it is not long before Jennings becomes a celebrity, following an intrepid escape from the school...
| Author | Gary Crew |
| ISBN | 1863301135 |
An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here
On 4 June 1629 the Dutch vessel Batavia struck uncharted rocks off the Western Australian coast. By the time help arrived over 120 men, women and children had met their deaths - not in the sea but murdered by two fellow survivors, Wouter...
| Author | Jim Crace |
| ISBN | 0140276009 |
Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality...
| Author | Storm Jameson |
| ISBN | 0706608429 |
This outstanding collection is made up of two short novels, A Day Off and The Single Heart, and three long stories which show the variety of the author's great writing skills that make her one of the most distinguished of women writers.
In A Day Off, Jameson tells of a day in the life of a middle-aged...
[narrator has returned home as WWII ends, after 15 years of fighting as a partisan; his aunt shows him the Latin verb study sheets still tacked to the ceiling of his bedroom where he studied as he lay in bed]
“Right you Are,” I smiled. “Amo--amas--amat…How odd!” I shook my head. “How odd…”
“Eh,...
