Saville

Saxton, a mining village in South Yorkshire, is the setting for David Storey's new novel, his most complex and ambitious since Radcliffe. Against a background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village, Colin Saville grows up to be shaped not merely by the spiritual and social ambitions of his starkly contrasted parents — the mother slow, long-suffering and deep-feeling, the father mercurial, outward-going, and violently charged — but by the character, richly observed and idiosyncratic, of the mining community itself. Out of this context of home and industrialized village emerges a deeply driven and resourceful child, set against the forces which have made him. Saville, David Storey's sixth novel, is an epic, gripping in its evocation of Colin Saville's struggles and of the sights and sounds of his place of birth, and powerful in its depiction of his spiritual and moral growth: it amply confirms David Storey's status as one of our leading novelists.