Book description
Joseph Tallantire has hope and ambition - like his father before him he
is determined to make something of himself and improve his lot. But life
is not easy for an uneducated young man in Cumberland before and during
World War II, and Joseph's struggle against the odds is the subject of
this moving and evocative novel. Suffering hardship and humiliation but
eventually achieving a position of some independence, Joseph serves as a
tribute to the many like him who lived through one of Britain's periods
of greatest social change. Melvyn Bragg's first novel, FOR WANT OF A
NAIL, was published in 1965 and since then his novels have included THE
HIRED MAN, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, WITHOUT A
CITY WALL, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, CREDO, THE MAID OF
BUTTERMERE and THE SOLDIER'S RETURN, which was published to huge
critical acclaim in 1999 and won the WHSmith Literary Award. He has also
written several works of non-fiction including SPEAK FOR ENGLAND, an
oral history of the twentieth century, RICH, a biography of Richard
Burton, ON GIANTS' SHOULDERS, a history of science based on his BBC
radio series, THE ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH, 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD,
IN OUR TIME and THE SOUTH BANK SHOW: FINAL CUT. He was born in 1939 and
educated at Wigton's Nelson Thomlinson School and at Oxford where he
read history. He is President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and
in 1998 he was made a life peer. He won an Academy Fellowship at the
BAFTA Television Awards in 2010.
