Caliban Shrieks - The Rediscovered Classic - Jack Hilton

Caliban Shrieks - The Rediscovered Classic - Jack Hilton / ISBN 9781784878757 / 162-page hardback with jacket from Vintage Classics / 2024 edition

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A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.

With new introductions by Andrew McMillan and Jack Chadwick

Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years.

A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell

'Magnificent' W H Auden