The Broken Chariot (Paperback, New Ed)

When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents – as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation – took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England which had everything to recommend it except pity.

Through the stifling, alarming years which follow, Herbert is held together by his desire for revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, out there, a new world beckons.

And when he's seventeen, he steals away from school, steals away from Herbert, becomes a different boy; becomes, in Nottingham, Bert the lathe-worker, Bert the womanizer, Bert the soldier, Bert the sometime bruiser. Plunged into the louche life, he bobs like a cork.

Herbert/ Bert is one of Alan Sillitoe's most superb creations: through him we see love, life and class in post-war England.

“Readable and indeed admirable, this is largely thanks to Sillitoe's abundant generosity of spirit, his affectionate understanding of provincial urban society and his eye for descriptive detail.”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

“Absorbing new novel. Sillitoe's sheer narrative drive manages to suspend most of the reader's disbelief. This is an old-fashioned novel – technically conventional, pulling off the usual tricks of character and motivation – but oddly alive in a way that a great deal of modern fiction, written by those as yet unborn when Sillitoe began his career, patently is not.”
MAIL ON SUNDAY

“It is a more rewarding novel than many that will get much more attention this autumn.”
IRISH INDEPENDENT

“Herbert/Bert is a clever, if chilling, creation.”
IRISH INDEPENDENT

“Sillitoe threads the lives of a single man with skill and craft; the book is a beautifully paced three hundred pages. The coded myth becomes a gripping narrative. And there are many other admirable dimensions. His social empathy with the dispossessed. His relenting poetic eye for the dissembling detail. His humane willingness to portray the unsympathetic as round characters rather than ciphers.”
THE HERALD, GLASGOW