This Sporting Life
By (Author) David Storey
Vintage Publishing
Vintage Classics
29th October 2018
27th September 2018
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Sports fiction
823.914
Paperback
304
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 18mm
213g
This Sporting Life is Storey's award-winning novel that inspired a film starring Richard Harris WINNER OF THE MACMILLAN PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Extraordinarily mature - technically as well as emotionally' Sunday Times Arthur Machin's life changes when he is picked for the Rugby league team in his local town. Once a struggling coal miner's son, now he can buy what he likes - a car, a fur coat for his widowed landlady, Mrs Hammond, who is becoming something more. But fame makes a mess of things. Machin is troubled by advances from the boss's wife, he challenges the sensibilities of the comfortable classes and struggles to understand why his success fails to impress Mrs Hammond. Gritty, full of ambition and anger, This Sporting Life is an unflinching and surgical dissection of one man's life and a rare foray onto the sports field in British fiction.
David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of Art. He wrote fifteen plays and eleven novels, including This Sporting Life which was made into a film starring Richard Harris. His work won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the Booker Prize for Saville. He died in 2017.