"I didn't like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn't sure I'd done.""They can spy on us all day to see if we're pulling our puddings and if we're doing our 'athletics', but they can't make an...
Alan Sillitoe burst onto the British literary scene in the late 50s & early 60s writing tough and gritty stories predominantly set in the Midlands amongst the working class poor, and dole recipients o...
Superb collection of short stories. Their power lies in the manner in wich they give you the satisfaction of reading, of constructing a story and give you the impression they have all the qualities a ...
I'd say three stars for the title story, but two for most of the rest. The title story, a long narrative by an angry, alienated young British man who’s been sent to a Borstal--a juvenile detention c...
This is one of the best collections of short stories, by an artist I'd never heard of, that I have ever read. Sillitoe was born and raised in Nottingham, England, in a working-class family. At the age...
I want to qualify this rating by saying that the title story in this collection is fantastic, and a few of the others were lovely in their own way. But there's a feeling of smallness in these stories,...
Some of these stories of working class lives in the first half of the 20th century almost made me cry. This is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because it contains so much misery but rat...
I found this to be a rough go. Excellently done but comes off strangely dated. ...
The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner We were marching to war and I was part of his army, with an elderberry stick at the slope and my pockets heavy with smooth, flat, well-chosen stones that wou...
This book surprised me, quite honestly. I came into it not really expecting it to be much of anything, perhaps even a bit of a snore. Admittedly, I wasn’t giving it much of a chance right out the ga...