Collected Novels of David Storey

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 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. 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. Storey's second novel, told in Margaret's voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award.

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. 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 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.

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. 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. 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.