Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Synopsis
Alan Sillitoe's bestselling debut novel about debauchery, infidelity... and the morning after Arthur Seaton, a ladies' man and factory-worker extraordinaire, has just downed seven gins and eleven pints at his local pub. Thoroughly smashed, he proceeds to tumble down an entire flight of stairs, pass out, and wake up again only to vomit on a middle-aged couple. Luckily Arthur's lover, Brendaa married woman with two kidslets Arthur escape to her bed. Such are Saturdays in this bachelor's life. When Arthur is not romancing Brenda, evading her husband, or drinking himself silly, he is turning up his nose at authority, disparaging the army, and trying to avoid paying too much income tax. Moreover, Arthur's rapscallion ways soon lead him into the bed of Brenda's younger sisterwho is also married. But no matter how much fun there is to be had, every Saturday night has its Sunday morning, replete with hangovers and consequences: A local bigmouth starts gossiping about Arthur's affairs, Brenda gets pregnant, the husbands find out what's been going on, and Arthur suffers a terrible beating. Perhaps the time has come for this playboy to settle down and marry that third woman he has been seeing on the side... One of the first books to sell over a million copies in the UK when it was released in paperback, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has since become a key literary reference of postwar British culture and society, as well as a classic British New Wave film. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author's estate.
About This Edition
Alan Sillitoe Press Reviews
‘That rarest of all finds: a genuine no-punches-pulled, unromanticised working class novel. Mr Sillitoe is a born writer, who knows his milieu and describes it with vivid, loving precision.’ Daily Telegraph
‘His writing has real experience in it and an instinctive accuracy that never loses its touch. His book has a glow about it as though he had plugged it into some basic source of the working-class spirit.’ Guardian
‘Miles nearer the real thing than D.H.Lawrence's mystic, brooding working-men ever came.’ Sunday Express
‘Outspoken and vivid.’ Sunday Times
About Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928, and left school at fourteen to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945. He enlisted in May 1946 into the RAFVR, and spent two years on active service in Malaya as a wireless operator. At the end of 1949, he was invalided out of the service with a hundred percent disability pension.
His first stories were printed in the ‘Nottingham Weekly Guardian’. In 1958 ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was published and ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, which won the Hawthornden prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.
Further works include ‘Key to the Door', The Ragman’s Daughter’ and ‘The General’ (both also filmed), ‘The William Posters Trilogy, A Start in Life, Raw Material, The Widower’s Son ‘- as well as eight volumes of poetry and ‘Nottinghamshire’, for which David Sillitoe took the photographs. His latest novels are ‘Her Victory, The Lost Flying Boat, Down From the Hill, Life Goes On, The Open Door, Last Loves, Leonard’s War,’ and ‘Snowstop’. He has also published his ‘Collected Stories’ and his autobiography, ‘Life Without Armour’.
Alan Sillitoe died in April 2010.
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