Books by Stan Barstow

'A major novelist' -- Punch'Warmth, liveliness, honesty and compassion' -- The Sunday TimesStan Barstow's landmark 'Brit-Lit' novel of the sixties immortalized Vic Brown, the amiable working class lad from the North and led the way for author's like Nick Hornby writing similar slice-of-life drama. Still as fresh and alive today, it spawned two sequels: The Watchers on the Shore (1966) and The Right True End (1976). First published in 1960, it has long been used as a set text in British schools. It has also been translated at various times into a film starring Alan Bates (1962) of the same name, a television series (1973) starring Clive Wood, a radio play and a stage play. A Kind of Loving was the first of a trilogy, published over the course of sixteen years, that followed hero Vic Brown through marriage, divorce and a move from the mining town of Cressley to London. This new edition includes an afterword by David Collard.

The story of Wilf Cotton, a young writer; he gets a short story broadcast on the radio, and so decides to leave his home in a mining village to work in a city, and to try to write a novel. It is also the story of a young woman who moves back to the city she left a few years earlier, and their relationship. Ask Me Tomorrow was produced at the Sheffield Playhouse in 1965, and as a radio play in 1966. The playscript was published by Samuel French in 1966.| 3 women, 4 men

Luther Stringer is the titular head of a Yorkshire working-class family of wife and three daughters - one married, one engaged, one a student.His middle daughter's "fiancy" is in bad odour with him for refusing to participate in a strike and being sent to Coventry. This dissension, however, pales into insignificance before the hornet's nest that is stirred up when Luther's eldest daughter discovers in her father's pocket a packet of "electronically tested" contraceptives. The women's reaction is instant and their vengeance terrible, but the result is unexpected and perhaps unwelcome. Stringer's Last Stand, however interpreted, may not be as cataclysmic as Custer's, but - it certainly shakes up a Yorkshire household.

A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories covering the last five decades of British life. A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower is brought to grief by a woman outside his real understanding, a factory worker finding his way through the physical world of his marriage real and involving, Barstow's stories are urgent slices of life, men and women struggling and succeeding to come to terms with The Likes of Us.