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.

This is not an easy book to read, I think you need to be a dedicated Sillitoe fan, luckily, I am ( )