The German Numbers Woman - Tapa dura

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 hmanity 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

Praise for his latest novel The Broken Chariot:

‘After Dickens, Sillitoe is one of the great mythbinders of English fiction.’
The Herald, Glasgow

‘Readable and indeed admirable, this is largely thanks to Sillitoe’s abundant generosity of spirit, his affectionate understanding of provincial urban society and his eye for telling descriptive detail.’
Times Literary Supplement

‘Absorbing new novel.’
Mail on Sunday

‘It is a more rewarding novel than many that will get much more attention this autumn.’
Scotsman

‘Hertbert/Bert is a clever, if chilling creation.’
Irish Independent

A top-rate novel of drugs, love and treachery from an author at the height of his powers.

Blind Howard, an ex-RAF veteran, possesses an acute sense of awareness, and can see almost better than the sighted. Morse code patterns his universe and keeps his mind tuned sharp to the big and sometimes bad world. Laura, his ever-doting wife, is loveliness personified. Things start to change when he meets the nefarious Richard. Morse is the common denominator of the alliance, but before long Howard’s world of dots and dashes, dits and dahs takes on new darker horizons when he clicks into a drugs racket which means leaving his caring wife for a wild voyage in search of a woman whose voice he has fallen in love with; and a sea-journey with maverick sailors on a heroin heist.