Birthday

Alan Sillitoe left school at 14 to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. In 1958, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was published, and ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, which won the Hawthornden Prize for literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.

‘Sillitoe remains the most physical of writers, spontaneous of language yet resolutely protective of its values. Sharing common territory with the late novels of Kingsley Amis, “Birthday” represents a carefully textured work by an old devil, still spiky after all these years.’ Independent‘A beautifully crafted and perceptive work.’ Daily Express‘Many people will certainly be in tune with the Seatons’ stoically nostalgic outlook, and the occasional flash of recognition that the present may not be as bleak as it is painted, and the past not as golden. Sillitoe does not make the process of growing old look particularly enjoyable, but he logs the details – the day-to-day difficulties; the growing isolation; the dying friends and family, slowly but surely removed from an ever-decreasing social circle – with a devastatingly accurate eye. Sillitoe’s insight is acute.’ Scotland on Sunday‘There are parallels here with Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils” – another old man’s book about old age. But it is well worth reading, both for its evocation of a vanished way of working-class life, and for its steadfast depiction of the horrors of old age and the valour and comradeship that can, in part at least, redeem it.’ Daily Telegraph