This Sporting Life
A Yorkshire miner's size and appetite for violence buy him a place in a professional rugby league side, where the directors handle their signing like bought stock and the town knows his name without knowing anything else about him. Off the field he lodges with a widow whose grief he cannot reach and whose affection he tries to compel, telling the whole of it himself in a voice that keeps missing what it has just described. Storey played professionally for Leeds while studying painting at the Slade, and the Macmillan Fiction Award went to a first book that gave the northern realist novel its rawest narrator.
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