Peter Granby lives in the grim, lackluster Nottingham so familiar from Alan Sillitoe’s classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning-underprivileged and only a step from fetching up in a corrective school. It’s an environment which sucks all who exist there down into a helpless and drab monotony.

But Granby attempts to escape the whirlpool.

When an old woman collapses outside the factory where he works, his efforts to help bring him an unexpected benefactress: her widowed daughter, Eileen-a wealthy, sensual and occasionally classy woman in early middle age.

And when she offers Peter a job as caretaker, gardener, factotum, he takes the opportunity farther than the class barrier between them can sustain…

“Taut, laconic, superbly sandpapered novella” OBSERVER

“Writing at his fertile best…out of social comedy looms something far more brutal” MAIL ON SUNDAY

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A dangerous liaison between a proud working-class boy and a wealthy young widow is at the center of this potent short novel by Alan Sillitoe.

Orphaned at fourteen, eighteen-year old Peter Granby is a high school dropout who works at a furniture factory and lives with his grandmother in Radford Woodhouse, a rough colliery town near Nottingham. Except for his touching and funny attempts to find a girl who will love him, Peter s life is as predictable as it is grim--until an accident brings him into contact with a young widow who offers him a job as a handyman. Middle-class and outwardly sophisticated, Eileen Farnsfieid is worlds away from Peter’s experience--but not for long.

Out of the Whirlpool is a concise and powerful work of fiction in the tradition of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. From the beginning of Peter’s story to its shattering conclusion, Alan Sillitoe brilliantly evokes the gritty life of Britain’s working classes and the dignity and dreams of a harely articulate young man.