Birthday - Hardcover

Praise for Alan Sillitoe:

‘A major writer who ought to be read.’
Malcolm Bradbury

‘Sillitoe keeps on going... never flagging, never looking back and writing with a vigour, clarity and humanity that should be the envy of all those novelists who were not even born when he started.’
Daily Mail

‘What impresses one, as ever, about Sillitoe, is the ease of a style which yet allows him to expose the most complex emotions, and his ability to bring to light what people hide from themselves, or choose not to admit.’
Scotsman

‘One of Britain’s most powerful and sophisticated fiction writers.’
Times Literary Supplement

Long awaited sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Birthday is the long-awaited sequel to Alan Sillitoe’s classic novel of the 1950s, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Four decades on from the novel which was at the forefront of the new wave of British Literature, we re-discover the Seaton brothers: older, cetainly; wiser – possibly not.

Arthur and Brian Seaton, one with an ailing wife, one with an emotional knapsack of failure and success, are on their way to Jenny’s 70th birthday party. Jenny and Brian had years ago experimented with sex – semi-clothed, stealthy, with the bonus of fear. Arthur, of course, had cut a winning swathe through the married and unmarried women of Nottinghamshire.

Life has changed. But there is still pleasure; and still pain.

Alan Sillitoe is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers of our time, and, indeed, one of the most influential.