Best Selling Books by David Storey

An art teacher searches for meaning in a strange town as his wife spirals into madness in this stunning novel from Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey Colin Freestone had not planned to live in northern England. The people here are so passionate and raw that he does not expect to ever understand them or feel at ease. But when his wife, Yvonne, fell sick, she would only accept psychiatric care if she could be near her mother, so Colin had no choice but to move north. As Yvonne wastes away in the hospital, sinking deeper and deeper into a terrifying and incomprehensible madness, Colin tries to make sense of his strange surroundings. He may live here now, but he will never call it home. To pass the time, he takes a job teaching art at a second-rate college that is headed by a nutrition-crazed dean. Colin makes friends, meets women, and plays tennis, but nothing can distract him from the fact that his wife is slowly dying and he is helpless to stop it.

A seventeen-year-old is sent to the country to live with his much-older half-brother and falls into an unexpected affair in this novel by Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey The narrator of Storey’s eleventh novel is an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old who shares intimate details of his life in the form of memos written to himself. Born in Beverly Hills, California, Richard “Rick” Audlin now lives with his film producer half-brother, Gerry—who is thirty-five years his senior—in a rambling old Victorian house in Hampstead. Gerry’s second wife, Martha, is a former film star who has been committed to a mental institution. When Gerry has to go abroad on business, he trundles Rick off to the home of his long-estranged sibling, James (Rick’s other half-brother), who lives on the outskirts of a remote village and is the author of seven unpublished crime novels. It is James’s wife, Clare, who meets Rick at the station. Flirty and attractive, she soon draws Rick into an illicit liaison. But Rick senses that something else is going on—something that will eventually lead him to a shattering secret in his family . . . and the thin ice they’re all skating on.

A novel about family and class restrictions by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of This Sporting Life and Saville With 2 rooms downstairs and 3 upstairs, the house at Spinney Moor Road is a real step-up for the Morley family. Arthur Morley is a farmer who frequently comes home drunk, and who often competes with his prudish, penny-pinching wife, Sarah, for the love of their boys, Alan and Bryan. It is Bryan, the younger son, who begins to want more out of life. He yearns for something better and finds it when he goes to live with the childless Fay Corrigan at her posh home in town during the week, while attending a prep school that she pays for. But Bryan soon feels a growing chasm between his new life and the world he left behind. And his mounting jealous-erotic obsession with the much-older Fay leads to actions—and consequences—that will reverberate for years to come. Beginning in the 1930s and concluding with the onset of World War II, A Prodigal Child is a novel about adolescent yearning, familial devotion, and the stifling conventions of class.

A rugby player finds fame and fortune in a bleak mining town, but he cannot outrun the emptiness he feels inside in Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey’s seminal first novel On Christmas Eve, Arthur breaks his two front teeth. A teammate on the rugby pitch is too slow with a handoff, and instead of catching the ball, Art catches an opponent’s foot right in the mouth. When he regains consciousness, the match is almost over, but he keeps playing regardless. Where else would he go? His entire life, Art has only cared about sports and nothing grabs his attention quite like the lightning-fast violence of Rugby League. He knows it could kill him, but it also makes him feel alive. In this hard-bitten Yorkshire mining town, the warriors of the rugby pitch are treated like gods. Through the aggressive sport, Art finds money, friends, and countless women. But when his lust for violence begins to fade, will he have the courage to leave the game behind?

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian) The Changing Room: "It's about exactly what it is: Storey offers us, with an unforced tenderness, the shifting moods of everyday experience...the scene is busy, purposeful and exhilerating. You'd never imagine realism could be this theatrical...The Changing Room takes you into its world in a way few plays achieve." (Independent on Sunday)

From “the leading novelist of his generation” (the Daily Telegraph)—a story about marriage, family, and 1 man’s 2nd chance At age 47, former playwright Frank Attercliffe lives with 2 of his 5 children in a 4-bedroom apartment on Walton Lane on the outskirts of an English suburb. For the past 3 years, his wife, Sheila, has been living with Maurice, a car dealer who owns a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, and a Jaguar—a man rumored to have killed 3 people in car accidents. Attercliffe cowrites a weekend football roundup for the local sports column, and after a match, he is introduced to the beautiful actress Phyllis Gardner at his favorite watering hole. That night, however, Sheila comes home, having left Maurice and given up her current lover, Gavin. She wants to move back to Walton Lane with the entire family—but she wants Attercliffe to move out. With its cast of eccentric and endearing characters, including Attercliffe’s loquacious fellow journalists, his alcoholic mentor, and the daughters who force him to live in the moment, Present Times is a novel about marriage, changing family values, and 2nd acts.

A miner’s daughter leaves home to make a new life in London with a married teacher in this beautiful love story that won the 1961 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Most of Margaret’s family is graveside when they lay her grandfather to rest. Although everyone is in the same place, they are not really together. Margaret descends from Yorkshire coal miners, stoic people who have mastered the art of burying their feelings deep underground. Her relatives may be content to live this way, but Margaret yearns for something more. A secretary at the Coal Board, she gets a glimpse of another life when she visits her brother at his university and a fair-haired art teacher catches her eye. The teacher’s name is Howarth; he is married, but that does not stop Margaret from risking everything she has in order to be with him. To escape the oppressive presence of her family, Margaret and Howarth flee to London. At first intoxicated by love, Margaret is soon shocked by what she finds in the city, and by how impossible it is to truly leave home.

One works. One looks around. One meets people. But very little communication takes place . . . That is the nature of this little island. As five apparently unrelated characters meet in a seemingly insignificant garden, the autumnal sun shines overhead and everybody waits for rain. What they discuss is superficially anything that can pass the time. What is portrayed is the very essence of England, Englishness, class, unfulfilled ambition, loves lost and homes that no longer exist. Storey's timeless play is a beautiful, compassionate, tragic and darkly funny study of the human mind and a once-great nation coming to terms with its new place in the world.

A wry and deeply affecting novel about a man’s ruminations on art and death by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of This Sporting Life Matthew Maddox is an art historian and professor emeritus at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art. Nearing 70, his 3 sons are grown and his ex-wife, Charlotte, has remarried. After a failed suicide attempt in front of a moving train, Maddox attends art therapy classes in order to find new meaning in his life. Although he is isolated, Maddox does have his champions. Simone, his lover and partner, is returning shortly from an analysts’ conference in Vienna. She has her own baggage, but Simone feels responsible for Maddox. Others who genuinely care about Maddox include his former mentor Daniel Viklund, whose wartime past fascinates Maddox; his older sister, Sarah; and his younger brother, Paul. There is also Eric Taylor, once his most promising student, now a convicted murderer, in whom Maddox sees echoes of his own life. An unabashed novel of mental illness, As It Happened tells of the prisons in which we find ourselves, the anxieties that exert their hold, and the desperate search for purpose in how we live and how we die.

An illustrated classic from the author of Saville and Flight into Camden Written before David Storey’s 1976 Man Booker Prize–winning novel Saville, Edward tells the tale of a kindly and aging bishop who lives his life by just and holy standards—until one day he is surprised by the appearance of an old key, sitting in a curious box atop his study desk. Illustrated by the fine hand of Donald Parker, Edward follows the bishop as he works to ascertain the true nature of the key—and the lock which it opens. In stunning, gripping prose the story unfolds as a mechanic comes to settle the matter once and for all. Part childlike, humorous frolic, part overarching metaphor for the challenges each of us face, Edward is a satirical classic.

A successful playwright, painter, and novelist confronts his mortality and the past during a major life crisis in this novel by Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey Richard Fenchurch has had a long and successful career as a playwright, painter, and novelist. But at age 65, he is coming apart at the seams. Fearing he will do something drastic if he remains alone, Fenchurch’s married daughter, Harriet, takes charge of his life. She moves her father from his squalid London apartment to his ancestral mansion, where he courted his 1st wife—Harriet’s mother, Bea—whom he met at a Christmas dance. Home again, with ghosts all around, Fenchurch journeys back in time while struggling to maintain his freedom and sanity. Past and present seamlessly intersect through the rich landscape of memory as Fenchurch begins to ruminate on his passionate affair 35 years earlier with his mother-in-law. In spite of their nearly 30-year age difference, the beautiful, exotic Isabella became the enduring love of his life. He relives his other romantic relationships as well, and through it all is plagued by self-doubt, depression, and guilt about how he has fared as a husband, a father, a friend, and a lover. Both a witty, spot-on portrayal of the indignities of age and an ardent evocation of youthful love, A Serious Man is above all a story about family.

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian) The Contractor: "A subtle and poetic parable about the nature and joy of skilled work, the meaning of community and the effect of its loss" (Observer); Home: "about the solitude and dislocation of madness and...the decline of Britain itself...part of the play's appeal is that Storey leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions...a play that contains within itself the still, sad music of humanity." (Guardian); Stages: "...an elegy for lost times and places, an obituary that has been free-associated by the corpse-to-be...Storey once said that a play 'lives almost in the measure that it escapes and refuses definition'. He has always been a writer who hints rather than states, let alone hectors." (The Times); Caring, a companion piece to Stages, reflects a reassessment and renegotiation of the conflict between life and art.

Three thought-provoking novels from the Man Booker Prize–winning British novelist of This Sporting Life and “an absorbing writer” (The New Yorker). The son of a coal miner who went on to play professionally in the rugby league, British author David Storey drew heavily on his own background for his debut novel, This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award and was made into a film with Richard Harris. “The leading novelist of his generation,” Storey was also a playwright and screenwriter, going on to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel, Saville (The Daily Telegraph). Collected here, Storey’s characters range from a seventeen-year-old compulsive note writer to a seventy-year-old suicidal art historian and a middle-aged sports columnist, but they all share a common trait: a profound questioning of life’s meaning. Thin-Ice Skater: An angst-ridden seventeen-year-old who shares intimate details of his life in the form of memos written to himself, Rick Audlin first goes to live with his much-older film producer half-brother, Gerry, whose second wife, Martha, a former movie star, has been committed to a mental institution. When Gerry has to go abroad, Rick moves in with his long-estranged other half-brother, James, a failed crime novelist, and is seduced by Clare, James’s wife. But Rick begins to realize something else is going on—something that will eventually lead him to a shattering secret in his family. As It Happened: After a failed suicide attempt in front of a moving train, seventy-year-old art historian and professor emeritus Matthew Maddox attends art therapy classes, hoping to find meaning in his life. Although he feels isolated, Maddox does have his champions. Simone, his lover and partner, is returning from an analysts’ conference in Vienna. There is also his former mentor, whose wartime past fascinates Maddox; his older sister, Sarah; and his younger brother, Paul—and Eric Taylor, once his most promising student, now a convicted murderer, in whom Maddox sees echoes of his own life. “A novel packed with argument and written with a close attention to the significance of gesture, the thing seen, the sound heard, the thought apprehended.” —The Scotsman Present Times: Former playwright Frank Attercliffe cowrites a sports column about football and lives with his children in relative peace—until the night his wife, who left him three years ago for a car dealer, returns home and announces she wants to move back in. Just one catch—she wants Frank to move out. “I enjoyed this book for its savagery, its stoically enduring hero, its taut, explosive dialogue.” —The Sunday Telegraph

Three powerful novels from the Man Booker Prize–winning British novelist of This Sporting Life and “an absorbing writer” (The New Yorker). The son of a coal miner who went on to play professionally in the rugby league, British author David Storey drew heavily on his own background for his debut novel, This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award and was made into a film with Richard Harris. “The leading novelist of his generation,” Storey was also a playwright and screenwriter, going on to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel, Saville (The Daily Telegraph). The collected fiction gathered here explores madness, romantic obsession, adolescent yearning, and class divisions with Storey’s characteristic “understanding of people and society” (The Times Literary Supplement). A Serious Man: Richard Fenchurch has had a long, successful career as a playwright, painter, and novelist. But at sixty-five, he is coming apart at the seams. His married daughter, Harriet, moves him from his squalid London flat to his ancestral mansion. Home again with ghosts all around, Fenchurch ruminates on past loves and choices, while struggling to maintain his freedom and sanity. “This spellbinding giant of a book is dashing, hectic, complex, sometimes almost wickedly aimless and terrifying. It reads like a wild animal flexing its muscles. . . . An electrifying success.” —The Mail on Sunday A Temporary Life: As his wife wastes away in a hospital, sinking deeper and deeper into a terrifying and incomprehensible madness, Colin Freestone tries to make sense of what his life has become. Having moved to Yvonne’s hometown in northern England for her psychiatric care, he teaches art at a second-rate college headed by a nutrition-crazed dean. He makes friends and meets women, but nothing can distract him from the fact that his wife is slowly dying and he is powerless to stop it. “A triumph . . . bitter, enriching.” —The New York Times A Prodigal Child: Desperate to escape the poverty of his family and his drunken father who works as a farmhand, Bryan goes to live with the childless Fay Corrigan at her posh home in town during the week, while attending a prep school that she pays for. But Bryan soon feels a growing chasm between his new life and the world he left behind. And his mounting jealous-erotic obsession with the much-older Fay leads to actions—and consequences—that will reverberate for years to come. “Quiet but telling drama, intense observation.” —Penelope Lively

The latest collection of David Storey's plays; including the newly revised and revived The Changing Room. Introduced by the author This third volume of David Storey's plays contains The Changing Room (Royal Court 1971): "If The Changing Room is Storey's most powerful drama, it is because he has found in sport his purest metaphor for the war of existence" (Time Magazine); Cromwell (Royal Court 1973): "An exploration of the vices and virtues of the English Puritan instinct using the historical associations of the Cromwellian period. On top of that it is also an impressive piece of poetic drama employing a spare, flinty, concrete language that seems to be hewn out of rock...a rich and complex play" (Guardian); Life Class: "a portrait of a man, dangerous, controlled, and wounded, who brings down his whole career in one enormous gesture signifying that all we hold of good from the past is now incapable of renewal and irrelevant to our present needs...Life Class is not merely a very good play. It is a blazing masterpiece...It is a tremendous experience and its glare lights up the sky." (Sunday Times) "David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian)

This third volume of David Storey's plays includes the newly revised and revived The Changing Room. The book comes with an introduction from Storey, explaining the meanings behind the plays.

A spiritual autobiography in the form of 40 years of collected verse. David Storey was born to a Wakefield mining family, and his poetry begins with a portrait of buried men and their industrial community. It explores the forces of regeneration and of faith tempered by doubt.

Two award-winning novels—including This Sporting Life—from the Man Booker Prize–winning British novelist and “an absorbing writer” (The New Yorker). The son of a coal miner who went on to play professionally in the rugby league, British author David Storey drew heavily on his own background for his debut novel, This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award. “The leading novelist of his generation,” Storey was also a playwright and screenwriter, going on to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel, Saville (The Daily Telegraph). The collected fiction gathered here includes This Sporting Life as well as his second novel, focusing on a female protagonist, also from a Yorkshire coal mining town. This Sporting Life: In a bleak Yorkshire mining town, an aggressive rugby league footballer finds fame, fortune, and countless women but cannot outrun the emptiness he feels inside. Storey also wrote the screenplay based on his “impressive first novel” for the award-winning film starring Richard Harris (The New York Times). “Classic . . . a revelation . . . Skeptical, belligerent, and acidly ironical.” —Edmund White, The Paris Review Flight Into Camden: Margaret, a miner’s daughter, leaves her oppressive family in Yorkshire, hoping to make a new life in London with a married teacher in this “love story written with seriousness and intensity” (The Observer). Storey’s second novel, told in Margaret’s voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. “A tour de force of domestic oppression . . . Rises on occasions to a pitch of precise beauty which I can only . . . describe as poetry.” —The Guardian

It is the 60th wedding anniversary of Tommy Pasmore and his wife. Their three children, Colin, the friendless academic who has bought the house in which his parents now live, childless Wendy, forsaking marriage for politics, and pragmatic Eileen, have returned home to celebrate, if that is the right expression. The senior Pasmores live together despite each other and as the layers of formal affection and bickering banter are peeled back we discover deep wells of disappointment and despair, not only for themselves but also for a society that appears to have exchanged one kind of poverty for another. But only by incanting memories can the elderly couple come to terms with their barren present and terrifying future.

Victor Tolson, a demoniac creature of massive proportions -- a man who destroys things out of his affections for them -- stalks Leonard Radcliffe, desiring to dominate and possess his remarkable, strangely innocent, nature. Radcliffe, the last product of a once-aristocratic family, recognises in Tolson everything that he himself is not, a man of irresistible strength, effectiveness, beauty and evil. Exploring a relationship of exceptional intensity between two men, each of whom, incomplete in himself, finds in the other a complementary and compulsive need, Radcliffe gradually reaches a pitch which can only end in cataclysmic confrontation.

Given its popularity, international football might be viewed as a prism through which the imagined community of the nation becomes closer to a manifest reality with matches providing examples of that community collectively rejoicing or crying. The sport potentially sheds insights on the complexities of ethnic and national identity, as it is a medium through which allegiances are (re)produced and expressed. Alongside the internationalisation of club teams, international representative teams also appear to be becoming more trans-national with players born outside that country, but with family connections to it, playing in the national colours. Increasing flexibility of regulations governing international representation means that countries can potentially select from a considerably broader pool of talent, drawing on players with ethnic or cultural connections to the country. For example, for a number of decades now, the Republic of Ireland team has included sizeable numbers of non-Irish born players, sons and grandsons of Irish emigrants. Similar tendencies are clear in the selection of English-born players of West Indian origin for football teams representing Caribbean countries. Colonial connections and related migration flows explain France’s selection of players born in places such as Algeria or Morocco but brought up in France. The successful French teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s drew heavily on players from a multiplicity of ethnic and geographic origins. Conversely, many African countries select French-born players of African origin thereby reclaiming some of the sons of their extensive diasporas and a sizeable number of players born in Europe have competed in the Africa Cup of Nations in recent years. In this way, historical colonial relationships and associated migration flows provide the backdrop to the more eclectic nature of national representative teams. Elsewhere this amalgamation of both civic and ethnic senses of national identity, has allowed teams like Turkey and Croatia to tap into their extensive emigrant pool. This book focuses on one dimension of the intricate connections between football, place and politics. It investigates the switching of national sporting allegiance by some footballers from their country of birth to country of residency or family origins, examines the reasons behind the recent growth of the phenomenon, and explores reactions to this.

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian) The second volume of David Storey's plays in the "World Classics" series contains three of his most enduring works: "The Restoration of Arnold Middleton", "In Celebration" and "The March on Russia".

Mr Ewbank is organising the marquee for his daughter's wedding. Erecting a huge muslin tent his team of labourers banter and backbite. The audience watch as these skilled men come together to facilitate an event they won't be attending, and come back the following day, after the fun has been had, to remove the construction again. Meanwhile, Ewbank watches as his labour and business are reined to deliver a send-off that will mark a fundamental shift in his working and family life. 'The Contractor' premiered at the Royal Court in October 1969.

Typescript; insertion points for the revisions are noted; last two leaves are marked "Alternative End".