Just as he is about to leave the RAF, Brian Seaton finds that he has TB. This disrupts his plans to return home - his marriage was in any case in difficulty - and the novel switches between Nottingham and the RAF sanitorium. Seaton is also torn between women - having affairs with two of the nurses at the sanitorium, while becoming involved with a young woman in his home town, who also has TB.

Michael Cullen leaves Nottingham and his pregnant girlfriend behind to flee to London. Here he becomes involved in a smuggling ring, headed by the shady Claude Moggerhanger, and ends up smuggling gold bars for Jack Leningrad, who lives in an iron lung.

From the author of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' come stories of hardship and hope in post-war Britain. The title story in this classic collection tells of Smith, a defiant young rebel, inhabiting the no-man's land of institutionalised Borstal. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frost-bitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running. A groundbreaking work, 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' captured the grim isolation of the working class in the English Midlands when it was first published in 1960s. But Sillitoe's depiction of petty crime and deep-seated anger in industrial and desperate cities remains as potent today as it was almost half a century ago.

Perhaps one of the most revered works of fiction in the twentieth-century, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner "is a modern classic about integrity, courage, and bucking the system. Its title story recounts the story of a reform school cross-country runner who seizes the perfect opportunity to defy the authority that governs his life. It is a pure masterpiece. From there the collection expands even further from the touching "On Saturday Afternoon" to the rollicking "The Decline and Fall and Frankie Buller." Beloved for its lean prose, unforgettable protagonists, and real-life wisdom, " The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" captured the voice of a generation, and its poignant and empowering life lessons will continue to captivate and entertain readers for generations to come.

Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) was an award-winning poet and one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century. He wrote more than fifty books, establishing an enduring critical and popular success with his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which set a new direction in writing about the reality of working-class lives in post-war Britain. His stories of working-class life earned him a reputation as one of the "angry young men" of a new generation of writers. His poetry, however, revealed his own inner life in a way that he found impossible to do in fiction. Presented here are Sillitoe's poems that present the world as he saw it. Using a storyteller's skill, he brought to life the people and places that captured his imagination and took him on a search for meaning. Fascist graffiti scrawled by an unseen hand on a wall in Irkutsk, three sons standing in silence by the grave of their father--this is Sillitoe's world as seen with his poet's eye, a vision that is at the same time clear and precise, politically engaged, fiercely intelligent, and deeply personal. Drawn from his eight volumes of poetry, this selection has been chosen by his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight.

Jan Jedlicka is a painter, draftsman, graphic artist, photographer and filmmaker, but also a wanderer, observer and explorer. His paintings are primarily a record of what he experiences as he walks through the landscape and engages with its changes. Combining different techniques and media, he creates multi-layered images of places he observes, usually over long periods of time. Formative for him were his sojourns in the Italian Maremma, Prague, and some areas in the British Isles. The publication opens up Jedlicka's work in its entirety – not chronologically, but as a mapping of the artist's movements through the landscape and along the paths of his various artistic strategies.

Director Karel Reisz's adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's novel about a hard-living factory worker and the married woman he seduces. Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) is a young man filled with a rage perhaps even he doesn't fully understand. Working in the tough environment of a Nottingham factory, he compensates for the drudgery and discipline of his weekday life with weekends spent drinking and womanising. His affair with a fellow factory worker's wife, Brenda (Rachel Roberts), seems especially ill-advised - particularly when Brenda informs him that she is pregnant with his child. With abortion illegal at the time, Arthur and Brenda face a difficult dilemma. Will Arthur face up to the kind of domestic responsibilities he openly scorns in his own parents, or run harder than ever?

A rousing and uproarious novel of the life, loves, and misadventures of a working-class rogue, "Saturday Night/Sunday Morning "marked the arrival of one of the most cherished authors in the twenty-first century.
At twenty-two years of age, Arthur Seaton is a hard-drinking lathe operator in a bicycle factory. Sharp, rowdy, and attractive, he is a lover of life in the raw, and his enormous vitality comes pouring through, at a family party, at the county fair, and in several pubs he haunts on Saturday nights, where more often than not he leaves with a woman on his arm. Before long, however, his devil may care life-style gets him into some serious trouble, and Arthur's life takes a turn that not even he could have imagined.