Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

I say without hesitation: this is one of the best books I ever read and has now become one of my favorites. By the same author as "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," and is sort of an expansion of that same main character. It's written in a mixed 1st/3rd person style, and it's highly entertaining, as well as a great statement on life in general. I don't want to spoil it for you, but if you like British novels of the 40s & 50s, then this is right up your alleyway.

Sillitoe's work shows Arthur living his life to the extent his class boundaries will allow. Drinking, womanising, and violence dominate Arthurs life away from his lathe. We follow him on the breathless ride that is his life in the first part of the novel Saturday Night, and then on his reajustment to a calmer more sustainable life in Sunday Morning. The perspective the reader is given is Arthurs if only he could articulate it. This allows the reader to experience the working class perspective without the limits that somone lacking the education to express themselves as effectively would have. This is the key to the novel as the reader can utterly empathise with Arthur. A working class novel that does not focus on poverty but how class frustrations are expressed makes a welcome change.

one of the best books i have ever been forced to read. my english class is reading it. an awesome novel.

A working class man in northern England, Sillitoe bring to life the way it used to be. Between cups of tea, Woodbines, too many pints for sobriety and a long list of ladies, our man Arthur spends his days in mindless bicycle manufacture and his nights forgetting it all. There is the smell of coal smoke in the winter air, the taste and crunch of fried bread and bacon, the scent of a woman and the hard reality of no exit. Arthur came from a family who had spent too many years on the dole, a situation now repreating itself in England. Prosperity was a full larder and an endless supply of cigarettes and new clothes. Sillitoe has captured it all in a book which still breathes the life he infused into it almost 40 years ago.