Absolute Beginners

Author	Norman Collins
ISBN	0141442336

Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ed Glinert, author of The London Compendium.

It is 1938 and the prospect...

Author	John Braine
ISBN	0416006116

This novel has astoundingly bad dialogue in it, all the way through to the bitter end, but it’s still a tough piece of British truth-telling. It’s about two things – class, and the possibilities of moving from the working class to the middle-class ( there’s a careful, excruciating listing of...

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	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...

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...

Author	Sam Selvon
ISBN	0582642647

From the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, his classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.

'His Lonely Londoners has acquired a classic status since it appeared in 1956 as the definitive novel about London's West Indians.' — Financial Times

'The...

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...

Author

David Storey

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...

Author

Walter Greenwood

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	Philip Larkin
ISBN	0571106927

Philip Larkin in Oxford, 1943

Philip Larkin opens A Girl in Winter with a chapter, three paragraphs long, in which he describes England during World War II, suffering through a stormy winter, its people trying to carry on daily life through numbness and deprivation:

[The snow]...

Author

Honoré de Balzac

The Comedy of Human Life (La Comédie Humaine) is the collective title given to a series of linked stories by Balzac, totalling about 100 in all, and loosely divided into groups, such as provincial, Parisian, political, military, and country. Conceived in 1834, his idea was to produce a work with philosophical...

Author

Daniel Woodrell

This is an early novel from Daniel Woodrell, the second in his Louisiana Bayou trilogy featuring St. Bruno detective, Rene Shade.

In the parish of St. Bruno the local citizenry exists in an uneasy alliance with a gaggle of small-time mobsters who are headed by a local boss named Auguste Beaurain....

Author	Vassilis Vassilikos
ISBN	0345017560

Perhaps this is one book where the material is subversive enough that I understand why there are elements in this world who would like to see this banned. And for that reason, also for the reason that I came across this novel by virtue of seeing the list of 1000 novels that people should read in their lifetime...

Author	Roger Friedland
ISBN	0060393882

Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius, but as a subject of controversy -- from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including the notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. Yet, as this landmark...

Author	Martin McDonagh
ISBN	0571345301

After months pass without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes pays for three signs challenging the authority of William Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command, Officer Dixon, a mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle...

Author	Marcus O'Dair
ISBN	1846687594

This is the first and definitive biography of Robert Wyatt, Britain's greatest cult musician. Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with the Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to...

Author	Elspeth Huxley
ISBN	0141182059

This book was on a "Top 5" recommendation by Richard Dawkins, noted atheist and author of "The God Delusion" He also wrote the Introduction to this. It was tough to find, evidently sent from Great Britain by Barnes and Noble as it only shows British and Canadian pricing. The first half of the book is told...

Author	Andy McSmith
ISBN	1849010099

The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless...

Author	Bill Naughton
ISBN	0850317940

Alfie's not really a bad guy. It's just that he has this overwhelming desire for the ladies. You might say that 'birds' are irresistible to him, sort of second nature. There's Ruby - 'A lust box in beautiful condition'; Clare - 'You're all lathered in sweat, Alfie'; and Siddie, and Crala, and Annie - but...