The Broken Chariot (Paperback, New Ed)

When Herbert Thargastan-Strong is seven years old, his doting parents move him from India to a heartless English prep school. For this cruelty he swears revenge and at 17 runs away from school and takes a new name, accent and lifestyle. He becomes Bert Gedler, a factory worker in Nottingham, until war breaks out and he enlists in the army. By now Herbert's father is a brigadier general and Bert is a hard-drinking, womanizing, ordinary soldier. Sillitoe takes a cool look at class, life and love in pre-1960s Britain and, as his hero resolves his split personality problem by becoming a novelist, he casts a sightly disparaging eye over the publishing business as well. (Kirkus UK)

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 his desire for revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, out 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 womanizer, 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 post-war England.

“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 descriptive detail.”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

“Absorbing new novel. Sillitoe's sheer narrative drive manages to suspend most of the reader's disbelief. This is an old-fashioned novel – technically conventional, pulling off the usual tricks of character and motivation – but oddly alive in a way that a great deal of modern fiction, written by those as yet unborn when Sillitoe began his career, patently is not.”
MAIL ON SUNDAY

“It is a more rewarding novel than many that will get much more attention this autumn.”
IRISH INDEPENDENT

“Herbert/Bert is a clever, if chilling, creation.”
IRISH INDEPENDENT

“Sillitoe threads the lives of a single man with skill and craft; the book is a beautifully paced three hundred pages. The coded myth becomes a gripping narrative. And there are many other admirable dimensions. His social empathy with the dispossessed. His relenting poetic eye for the dissembling detail. His humane willingness to portray the unsympathetic as round characters rather than ciphers.”
THE HERALD, GLASGOW

General

Imprint:	Flamingo
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	October 1999
First published:	October 1999
Authors:	Alan Sillitoe
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	304
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-00-649305-1
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-00-649305-X
Barcode:	9780006493051

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