Birthday - Softcover

Sillitoe, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753166518 ISBN 13: 9780753166512

Publisher: ISIS Large Print Books, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Birthday is Alan Sillitoe's eagerly awaited sequel to his classic novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958. The novel transformed post-war English fiction, and gave a new voice to working-class masculinity of the 1950s. In Birthday, Sillitoe returns to the Nottinghamshire of his earlier novel, to explore what happened to the original characters.

Brian Seaton returns to the town of his birth to visit his childhood sweetheart's 70th birthday party, and to see his roguish brother, Arthur. The result is an extremely elegiac, downbeat novel, as Brian and his brother flit between their ageing present and vibrant past. Brian, now a successful scriptwriter based in London, visits his old haunts, reflecting that "no matter how changed, it was an area in which he had no need of maps. Everything was in the past, but an event could leap to mind with such intensity it might have happened in the last five minutes". It is this tone that pervades Birthday. Very little actually happens in the novel, as Brian and Arthur travel around the area, coming to terms with disappointments, disillusions and the now ailing characters that made sense of their younger lives. The story is loosely structured around Brian's tortuous relationship with Jenny, trapped in a marriage to a crippled ex-steelworker. But as the novel progresses, he realises that "they were in love with the past rather than each other".

Birthday is a poignant but very low-key evocation of a world that has been lost forever. It will appeal to those who found Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning a breath of fresh air, but others may question the wisdom of a sequel over 40 years on. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: ISIS Large Print Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0753166518
• ISBN 13: 9780753166512
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312