Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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	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	Nell Dunn
ISBN	0860689905

'To think when I was a kid I planned to conquer the world and if anyone saw me now they'd say, "She's had a rough night, poor cow."'

From the opening chapters I was enamoured of Nell Dunn's classic of 60s working class London, so much about its portrait of a young under educated girl felt completely...

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	John O'Hara
ISBN	0786706821

Two stars for effort. For the enormous effort it took to create this 981 page behemoth. 981 pages of tiny print and tiny margins. There are no chapters. Just little breaks in the text here and there.

I suspect if Ayn Rand and Herman Wouk birthed a novel together, this would be it.

According...

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	Shelagh Delaney
ISBN	0802131859

Jo, the teenage heroine who lives in a filthy tenement bedsitter, is deserted by her nagging peroxided mother, who is unaware that her daughter is pregnant by a black sailor. Jo's greatest fear is that her illegitimate baby might be mentally deficient like her own father. To soothe, clean and cook for...

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	Kingsley Amis
ISBN	0575008156

Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a...

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	Muriel Spark
ISBN	1566492262

To rendezvous with her archeologist fiance in Jordan, Barbara Vaughn must first pass through the Mandelbaum Gate--which divides strife-torn Jerusalem. A half-jewish convert to Catholicism, an Englishwoman of strong and stubborn convictions, Barbara will not be dissuaded from her ill-timed...

Author

Robert Nye

The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn't done him justice -- it's time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process...

Author	Angus Wilson
ISBN	0586049029

Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970–73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice...

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	Budd Schulberg
ISBN	0850315204

Halliday won his success as a writer - and won the wife who loved him - after the First War. Then came the wild Twenties and years of high-pressure speakeasy carousing. Halliday was attractive, Halliday was charming, Halliday was weak. He flashed through the skies like a comet.

This overwhelmingly...

Author	Richard Hughes
ISBN	0940322293

A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...