D J Taylor

Naked in Nottingham

The Hosanna Man

By

Shoestring Press 240pp £9.99 order from our bookshop

Back in 1975, the New Fiction Society – a highbrow book club underwritten at calamitous expense by the Arts Council – took out a full-page advertisement in The Observer to promote its inaugural list. The ad took the form of a series of portraits, each attached to a starkly interrogative caption. One of these demanded of its subject, ‘Is this a working-class novelist?’ It was a good question, as working-class novelists nearly always turn out to be a heterogeneous bunch, keen to resist the broad categorisations wished upon them by textbooks or the smash-and-grab raids of social historians anxious to fillet their novels for supporting detail.

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