Love on the Dole

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	Lao She
ISBN	0061436925

A beautiful new translation of beloved Chinese author Lao She's masterpiece of social realism, about the misadventures of a poor Beijing rickshaw driver

First published in China in 1937, Rickshaw Boy is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller...

Author

Miklós Bánffy

Painting an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, this story is told through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Balint Abady and Count Laszlo Gyeroffy. Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest...

Author	Winifred Holtby
ISBN	0860689697

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Winifred Holtby's greatest novel was published posthumously

Winifred Holtby's masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls'...

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	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	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	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	Barry Hines
ISBN	0141184981

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires...

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	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

Philip Paris

The Italian Chapel is a story of forbidden love, lifelong friendships torn apart, despair and hope, set against the backdrop of the creation of a symbol that is known around the world.

Amidst strikes, conflicts and untold hardships, the Italian prisoners of war sent to a tiny Orkney island...

Author	Ronald Blythe
ISBN	1585790095

In this rich, rare book— which John Updike called "exquisite"— forty-nine men and women— a blacksmith and a bellringer to the local vet and a gravedigger— speak to us directly, in honest and evocative monologues, of their works and days in the rural country of Suffolk. Composed in the late 1960's,...

Author

Robert Roberts

The author's memoir of growing up around the time of WWI in a slum neighbourhood of Salford where his parents had a simple shop. Customers preferred to be served by his mother because she sliced meat so finely that it looked like more on the plate.

Contains reflections on politics, culture and...

Author	Juliet Gardiner
ISBN	0755310284

Juliet Gardiner's critically acclaimed book - the first in a generation to tell the people's story of the Second World War - offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the...