Description

‘Witty and unusual’ George Orwell
‘Magnificent’ W H Auden

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.

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.

Publisher Review

A breathless and dizzying modernist howl of a novel — Andrew McMillan * Guardian * Equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant… [Caliban Shrieks] contains an energy that drives the reader on * Observer * A powerful, uncompromising account of working class life… [which] deserves reading and rereading * Socialist Worker * A sharp and compelling work of literary modernism… Caliban Shrieks…speak[s] powerfully to our own time * Morning Star * A singular book in both tone and structure… Hilton’s prose carries the twin forces of indignation and adverse experience * The New Yorker *