I also nominate
Saville by David Storey, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1976 and referred to as 'the best of all the Bookers'. David Storey won several major awards in the 1960s and 1970s for his works.
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Set in South Yorkshire, this is the story of Colin Saville’s struggle to come to terms with his family - his mercurial, ambitious father, his deep-feeling, long-suffering mother - and to escape the stifling heritage of the raw mining community into which he was born.
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This is the story of Colin Saville, a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there is triumph in this, not least for the father who had spurred him on, but later "alienated from his class, and with nowhere yet to go" Colin finds himself spiritually destitute, bitter, still held against his will in the place that made him . . . A feast of a book . . . it engenders remarkable tension because this self-effacing author, before removing himself from the book, seems to enter organically into his characters, writing from the gut of their experience.' - Sunday Telegraph
'Reading this magnificent book is like drinking pure spring water from cupped hands. It has no false notes, no heaviness of emphasis, no editorial manipulations of plot to prove a point. One becomes so totally involved in the lives of these people that their every word and action becomes charged with meaning.... Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century classic.' - Jeremy Brooks, Sunday Times
'Again and again I found myself paying Storey the reader's finest compliment of saying, "This is the way it has to be, because this is the way it really is." 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, this novel will delight and move you.' - C.J. Driver, The Guardian
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