The Broken Chariot - Tapa dura

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

‘Sillitoe writes with tremendous energy, and his stories simply tear along.’
Daily Telegraph

‘Alan Sillitoe, the long-distance runner of English novelists, shows no signs of flagging’
Evening Standard

‘Our staunchest provincial realist... a muscled prose that’s craftsman-like in its efficiency’
Observer

‘Graphic, tough, outspoken, informal’
The Times

‘His writing has real experience in it and an instinctive accuracy that never loses its touch.’
Guardian

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

‘Very outspoken and vivid.’
Sunday Times

Alan Sillitoe is one of the great English writers of the twentieth century. His latest novel is funny, picaresque – a joy.

When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents – as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation – took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England which had everything to recommend it except pity. Through the stifling, alarming years which follow, Herbert is held together by the notion of revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, over there, a new world beckons.

And when he’s seventeen, he steals away from school, steals away from Herbert, becomes a different boy; becomes, in Nottingham, Bert the lathe-worker, Bert the womaniser, Bert the soldier, Bert the sometime bruiser. Plunged into the louche life, he bobs like a cork.

Herbert/Bert is one of Alan Sillitoe’s most superb creations: through him we see love, life and class in the post-war world.