Alligator Playground

From one of England’s greatest living writers comes a collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life’s great playground.

Relationships – clandestine and legitimate – are the theme: boorish chaps and their stalwart women ululate and hum; marriages and infidelities tick-tock and tick over; Fitzrovian passion flares; strong men turn to drink. Love, sex, loss, are captured in Mr Sillitoe’s inimitable style.

As well as the general theme of the union of the sexes, we have inspired insights into birth, boyhood, bereavement and aloneness in a collection of perfectly narrated observations, in which the reader participates in each extraordinary experience.

Reviews

Praise for Alan Sillitoe’s Collected Stories:

‘Sillitoe is, at his best, a master of the genre. Tense, compact and gritty, they speak out with a voice that one recognises at once, with gratitude, as wholly truthful’
Evening Standard

‘No one who cares for good writing and honesty of purpose will want to be without a copy’
Scotsman

‘As a short-story writer he is on the fringe of the VS Pritchett class, along with the justly admired (but unjustly more admired) William Trevor. It is time the magnitude of Sillitoe’s achievement was more widely recognized.’
Daily Telegraph

About the author

Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 and left school at 14 to work in various factories before becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945. He began writing after four years in the RAF. His novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are both classics.