David Storey

Saville

"Victor Tolson, a demoniac creature of massive proportions -- a man who destroys things out of his affections for them -- stalks Leonard Radcliffe, desiring to dominate and possess his remarkable, strangely innocent, nature. Radcliffe, the last product of a once-aristocratic family, recognises in Tolson everything that he himself is not, a man of irresistible strength, effectiveness, beauty and evil. Exploring a relationship of exceptional intensity between two men, each of whom, incomplete in himself, finds in the other a complementary and compulsive need, Radcliffe gradually reaches a pitch which can only end in cataclysmic confrontation."--Back cover.

Radcliffe

Phoenix

A seventeen-year-old is sent to the country to live with his much-older half-brother and falls into an unexpected affair in this novel by Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey The narrator of Storey’s eleventh novel is an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old who shares intimate details of his life in the form of memos written to himself. Born in Beverly Hills, California, Richard “Rick” Audlin now lives with his film producer half-brother, Gerry—who is thirty-five years his senior—in a rambling old Victorian house in Hampstead. Gerry’s second wife, Martha, is a former film star who has been committed to a mental institution. When Gerry has to go abroad on business, he trundles Rick off to the home of his long-estranged sibling, James (Rick’s other half-brother), who lives on the outskirts of a remote village and is the author of seven unpublished crime novels. It is James’s wife, Clare, who meets Rick at the station. Flirty and attractive, she soon draws Rick into an illicit liaison. But Rick senses that something else is going on—something that will eventually lead him to a shattering secret in his family . . . and the thin ice they’re all skating on.

A Novel

Thin-Ice Skater

Depicts a crucial day in the life of an art school teacher named Allott, as he aims to lead his class through the processes of discovery that will turn their sketches into artworks, but which instead lead only to troubling scenes and crossed boundaries.

Life Class

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian) The Changing Room: "It's about exactly what it is: Storey offers us, with an unforced tenderness, the shifting moods of everyday experience...the scene is busy, purposeful and exhilerating. You'd never imagine realism could be this theatrical...The Changing Room takes you into its world in a way few plays achieve." (Independent on Sunday)

The Changing Room

Early Days ; Sisters ; and Life Class

Drama set in a men's changing room before, during and after a semi-pro Northern England rugby league football game.

A Play

It is the 60th wedding anniversary of Tommy Pasmore and his wife. Their three children, Colin, the friendless academic who has bought the house in which his parents now live, childless Wendy, forsaking marriage for politics, and pragmatic Eileen, have returned home to celebrate, if that is the right expression. The senior Pasmores live together despite each other and as the layers of formal affection and bickering banter are peeled back we discover deep wells of disappointment and despair, not only for themselves but also for a society that appears to have exchanged one kind of poverty for another. But only by incanting memories can the elderly couple come to terms with their barren present and terrifying future.

The March on Russia

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian)

Restoration of Arnold Middleton; In Celebration; March on Russia

Storey Plays: 2

As playwright, painter and novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both successful and rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London house and installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house and in a changed though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on freedom and sanity, and allows himself to relax into memory. Time is catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough - it was a successful marriage as these things go - but the old surroundings, both the building and the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancée's mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age and a delicately erotic evocation of a youthful and dangerous affair.

A Serious Man

Given its popularity, international football might be viewed as a prism through which the imagined community of the nation becomes closer to a manifest reality with matches providing examples of that community collectively rejoicing or crying. The sport potentially sheds insights on the complexities of ethnic and national identity, as it is a medium through which allegiances are (re)produced and expressed. Alongside the internationalisation of club teams, international representative teams also appear to be becoming more trans-national with players born outside that country, but with family connections to it, playing in the national colours. Increasing flexibility of regulations governing international representation means that countries can potentially select from a considerably broader pool of talent, drawing on players with ethnic or cultural connections to the country. For example, for a number of decades now, the Republic of Ireland team has included sizeable numbers of non-Irish born players, sons and grandsons of Irish emigrants. Similar tendencies are clear in the selection of English-born players of West Indian origin for football teams representing Caribbean countries. Colonial connections and related migration flows explain France's selection of players born in places such as Algeria or Morocco but brought up in France. The successful French teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s drew heavily on players from a multiplicity of ethnic and geographic origins. Conversely, many African countries select French-born players of African origin thereby reclaiming some of the sons of their extensive diasporas and a sizeable number of players born in Europe have competed in the Africa Cup of Nations in recent years. In this way, historical colonial relationships and associated migration flows provide the backdrop to the more eclectic nature of national representative teams. Elsewhere this amalgamation of both civic and ethnic senses of national identity, has allowed teams like Turkey and Croatia to tap into their extensive emigrant pool. This book focuses on one dimension of the intricate connections between football, place and politics. It investigates the switching of national sporting allegiance by some footballers from their country of birth to country of residency or family origins, examines the reasons behind the recent growth of the phenomenon, and explores reactions to this.

Transferring Allegiance

Football, Place and National Identity

Politics and political relationships underpin the world we live in. From the division of the earth’s surface into separate states to the placement of ‘keep out’ signs, territorial strategies to control geographic space can be used to assert, maintain or resist power and as a force for oppression or liberation. Forms of exclusion can be consolidated and reinforced through territorial practices, yet they can also be resisted through similar means. Territoriality can be seen as the spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside. The extensively revised and updated second edition continues to provide an introduction to theories of territoriality and the outcomes of territorial control and resistance. It explores the construction of territories and the conflicts which often result using a range of examples drawn from various spatial scales and from many different countries. It ranges in coverage from conflicts over national territory (such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, South Ossetia) to divisions of space based around class, gender and race. While retaining the key elements of the first edition, this new edition covers contemporary debates on nationalism, territorialization, globalization and borders. It updates the factual content to explore the territorial consequences of ‘9/11’, the ‘war on terror’ and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also examines migration, refugees, the territorial expansion of the European Union, and territorial divisions in the home and workplace. The book emphasizes the underlying processes associated with territorial strategies and raises important questions relating to place, culture and identity. Key questions emerge concerning geographic space, who is ‘allowed’ to be in particular spaces and who is barred, discouraged or excluded. Written from a geographical perspective, the book is inter-disciplinary, drawing on ideas and material from a range of academic disciplines including, history, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies. Each chapter contains boxed case studies, illustrations and guides to further reading.

The Claiming of Space

Territories

Territories: Nations, States and the Claiming of Space provides a comprehensive introduction to theories of territoriality and the geographical outcomes of territorial control. Chapter topics cover territory and territoriality, the state, nations and nationalism, nationalism and the importance of place, future of the sovereign state, sub-state territorial divisions, and territory and locality. For individuals with an interest in political geography.

Territory

One works. One looks around. One meets people. But very little communication takes place . . . That is the nature of this little island. As five apparently unrelated characters meet in a seemingly insignificant garden, the autumnal sun shines overhead and everybody waits for rain. What they discuss is superficially anything that can pass the time. What is portrayed is the very essence of England, Englishness, class, unfulfilled ambition, loves lost and homes that no longer exist. Storey's timeless play is a beautiful, compassionate, tragic and darkly funny study of the human mind and a once-great nation coming to terms with its new place in the world.

Home

The third son of a coalminer, David Storey takes us from his tough upbringing in Wakefield, to being 'sold' to Leeds Rugby League Club, to his escape to the Slade School of Art and his life in post-war London. He describes shocking scenes in the seventeen deprived East End schools in which he taught. He documents the childhood death of his eldest brother, addressing much of the memoir to him and exploring how this relates to his own sometimes paralysing depression, which haunted most of his life. And yet, a prolific and celebrated writer, he recalls heady spells in New York, close relationships in the theatre with Joycelyn Herbert, Ralph Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, early success with This Sporting Life, and winning the Booker Prize for his novel Saville.

A Memoir

A Stinging Delight

At the play's core is a semi-pro Northern England rugby league team. During the week, its members are peaceable men toiling away at mindless, working class jobs. On Saturday, they prepare for gory combat on the playing field. The changing room is where they perform their pre-game initiation rites, strip down, loosen muscles, and get into their uniforms. After the match they return, often broken, muddy, and bloody, regretting their loss or giddy with victory in the communal shower. There is little in the way of plot, but Storey engages his audience with his ability to dissect his characters' hurts, hopes, desires, and fighting instincts.

The Booker prize-winning novelist returns with his finest novel to date -- a profound meditation on the nature of death and what we live for. Involuntary self-murder is a symptom of what Matthew Maddox, emeritus professor of the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, considers to be a cultural as well as a social malaise -- his summing-up of the century he has lived through. His children gone, his wife re-married, his attempt at suicide having failed, he is drawn remorselessly through a process of rehabilitation, a search for “purpose”. Even a man divided from himself is not alone. Struggling for his future are Simone, his lover and former analyst; his revered mentor, Daniel Viklund; his brother Paul and reliable sister Sarah. But against him stands his past; and above all, Eric Taylor, once his brightest student and now a convicted murderer. From the Hardcover edition.

As it Happened

A wry and deeply affecting novel about a man’s ruminations on art and death by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of This Sporting Life Matthew Maddox is an art historian and professor emeritus at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art. Nearing 70, his 3 sons are grown and his ex-wife, Charlotte, has remarried. After a failed suicide attempt in front of a moving train, Maddox attends art therapy classes in order to find new meaning in his life. Although he is isolated, Maddox does have his champions. Simone, his lover and partner, is returning shortly from an analysts’ conference in Vienna. She has her own baggage, but Simone feels responsible for Maddox. Others who genuinely care about Maddox include his former mentor Daniel Viklund, whose wartime past fascinates Maddox; his older sister, Sarah; and his younger brother, Paul. There is also Eric Taylor, once his most promising student, now a convicted murderer, in whom Maddox sees echoes of his own life. An unabashed novel of mental illness, As It Happened tells of the prisons in which we find ourselves, the anxieties that exert their hold, and the desperate search for purpose in how we live and how we die.

David Storey

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