Few contemporary British authors have had as much success writing in two genres as David Storey in fiction and drama. His first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), brought him the Macmillan Fiction Award, and his sixth novel, Saville (1976), elicited Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize for Fiction. He has twice won the Evening Standard Drama Award for best play of the year in London, and he is the only playwright ever to have won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award three times. He has been a prolific writer. During the first two decades of his career, he had seven novels and eleven plays published (over a dozen plays were produced on British stages), and all of his books are still in print, often in popular Penguin and Avon paperback editions.

His novels, usually written in a terse and understated prose, are conventional realistic works in the...