Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.

If you haven't read David Storey's 1976 winner Saville read it at once, it is the best of all the Bookers * Observer *
A tremendous novel * The Economist *
A marvellous evocation of place and character... This is a book made more than usually remarkable by its intensity of feeling * Daily Telegraph *
If you are looking for an intellectual and artistic honesty, a patient thoughtfulness and detailed insight into other lives, a controlled drama of ordinary and extraordinary people in realised England, this novel will delight and move you * Guardian *
Saville is a splendid novel, replete with virtues beyond its appeal to those otherwise undiscriminating readers who demand stories about nice people. -- Peter S. Prescott * Newsweek *

David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of Art. He wrote fifteen plays and eleven novels, including This Sporting Life which was made into a film starring Richard Harris. His work won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the Booker Prize for Saville. He died in 2017.