Alan Sillitoe

Advantages: Gritty working-class realism from the 1950's.
Disadvantages: A long way before political correctness.

...is away. Oh, and Arthur also has it off with Brenda's sister Winnie too. He even goes to Goose Fair with the pair of them while he's also going out with a nineteen-year-old girl called Doreen. And he has the brass neck to describe Nottingham women as "cheeky-daft" gold-diggers! Unfortunately for him, Winnie's hubby is a 'swaddie' in the army... In 1960 a film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field, was made on location in Nottingham. There is of course one particularly memorable scene in the film which lives long in the memory of an impressionable young Nottingham lad such as myself: the one where Arthur shoots "fat Mrs. Bull" in the cheek. Now, when I say cheek, in the book it is the cheek, whereas in the film... Alan Sillitoe was born in Radford, Nottingham, in 1918. At fourteen, he left school... Read review

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Advantages: Poignant, erudite and real.
Disadvantages: Despondent, disillusioned, and pessimistic; and the bleak view of disability might not go down well.

..."The older you get the more people around you kick the bucket." So says Arthur Seaton, the angry young man of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, who is now a grumpy sixty year-old man. It has taken Alan Sillitoe forty years to return to the character that made his name, but it has been well worth the wait. But first, for the benefit of those of you not from Nottingham, or not old enough to remember Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or who haven't read my review of it here on Ciao, you have some catching up to do... The Author ' Alan Sillitoe was born in Radford, Nottingham, in 1918. He left school at fourteen to work in the Raleigh bike factory. Later he enlisted in the RAF and became a wireless operator. He caught tuberculosis while posted in Malaya and during the time he spent convalescing... Read review

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Advantages: Insightful, educational and exciting.
Disadvantages: None.

...In his depiction of working class poverty, Roddy Doyle is fast becoming Ireland’s George Orwell. Charles Dickens’ portrayal of slum London was written over a hundred years ago, and descriptive as it is, it has lost some of its power by being too far removed from our own lives. Only Orwell and, perhaps, Alan Sillitoe have managed more recently to show the sheer banality of deprivation. Now we have Doyle, winner of the Booker Prize in 1993, for his humorous work, ‘Paddy Clark Ha, Ha, Ha; showing a much harder edge to his fiction. ‘A Star Called Henry’ is a brutal story of poverty, violence, betrayal and oppression. Henry Smart is born in the slums of turn of the century Dublin. His father is a one-legged bouncer at a brothel who turns to paid murder, and disappears one night to be presumed dead. His mother... Read review

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