Alligator Playground

Description

From one of England's greatest living writers comes a new collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life's great playground. Relationships - clandestine and legitimate - are the theme: boorish chaps and their stalwart women ululate and hum; marriages and infidelities tick-tock and tick over; Fitzrovian passion flares; strong men turn to drink. Love, sex, loss, are captured in Mr Sillitoe's inimitable style. As well as the general theme of the union of the sexes, we have inspired insights into birth, boyhood, bereavement and aloneness in a collection of perfectly narrated observations, in which the reader participates in each extraordinary experience.

Alan Sillitoe left school at 14 to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry Aircraft Production in 1945. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. 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.

Praise for Alan Sillitoe's Collected Stories: 'Sillitoe is, at his best, a master of the genre. Tense, compact and gritty, they speak out with a voice that one recognises at once, with gratitude, as wholly truthful' Evening Standard 'No one who cares for good writing and honesty of purpose will want to be without a copy' Scotsman 'As a short-story writer he is on the fringe of the VS Pritchett class, along with the justly admired (but unjustly more admired) William Trevor. It is time the magnitude of Sillitoe's achievement was more widely recognized.' Daily Telegraph