The Collected Novels Volume One

Book excerpt: 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