The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Smith, a defiant young rebel, inhabits the no-man's-land of institutionalised Borstal. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frost-bitten earth, he wonders why, for whom, and for what he is running. A groundbreaking collection of stories, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner captured the grim isolation of the working class in the English Midlands when it was first published in the late 1950s. But Sillitoe's depiction of petty crime and deep-seated anger in industrial and desperate cities remains as potent today as it was over half a century ago.