Saville

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1976, Saville is the story of one young man trying to make his way in the world

David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of Art. He wrote fifteen plays and eleven novels, including This Sporting Life which was made into a film starring Richard Harris. His work won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the Booker Prize for Saville. He died in 2017.

WINNER OF THE 1976 BOOKER PRIZE 
 
'If you are looking for an intellectual and artistic honesty, a patient thoughtfulness and detailed insight into other lives...this novel will delight and move you' Guardian 
 
In spite of his brilliance, Colin Saville doesn't fit in easily at the grammar school in town - 1940s middle-class society is so different from the mining village of his childhood. He makes tentative friendships and meets girls over long, empty summers but feels like an outsider with them and, increasingly, at home. 
 
Following the pattern of David Storey’s own early years, Saville is a remarkably honest portrait of the tensions between parents and children, the difficulties of making one’s own way in life, and the social divisions that persist still.

David Storey

WINNER OF THE MACMILLAN PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
'Extraordinarily mature - technically as well as emotionally' Sunday Times 
 
Arthur Machin's life changes when he is picked for the Rugby league team in his local town. Once a struggling coal miner's son, now he can buy what he likes - a car, a fur coat for his widowed landlady, Mrs Hammond, who is becoming something more. But fame makes a mess of things. Machin is troubled by advances from the boss's wife, he challenges the sensibilities of the comfortable classes and struggles to understand why his success fails to impress Mrs Hammond. 
 
Gritty, full of ambition and anger, This Sporting Life is an unflinching and surgical dissection of one man's life and a rare foray onto the sports field in British fiction.

David Storey

This Sporting Life

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