This is one of Sillitoe’s Nottingham stories. It’s a prequel to his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and a sequel to Key to the Door. It features Brian Seaton, older brother of Arthur Seaton the hero of Saturday and Sunday Morning. The dialogue in the book is written in a regional dialect, and in what I suppose is a stream of consciousness style.

It’s 1949, Brian Seaton is out of the army and diagnosed with TB. Pensioned off in his early twenties, he decides to become a writer. By the end of the book he has had a few stories and magazines articles published, a novel rejected, slept with, and left, four women (one of whom killed herself) and moved to France. In many ways this is a brutal book, about what it takes to be yourself, and what it takes out of you, so much easier to do what is expected of you.