Everything we do as an organisation is funded from a small share of the money from each sale of Jack Hilton's debut novel, Caliban Shrieks, which was published for the first time since the 1930s in 2024, following a long hunt for the copyrights that you can read about here.
First published in 1935, Caliban Shrieks is a lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, a once lost, now rediscovered, masterpiece of 1930s British literature.
You can purchase the book from national retailers Waterstones and Amazon, or, we would recommend, your local booksellers. A local favourite in Manchester is Chapter One Books.
More about the book, from Vintage Classics:
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.
Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.
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.
Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.
'Witty and unusual' George Orwell
'Magnificent' W H Auden
'Magnificent' W H Auden