Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky

by Michael Holroyd (Introduction), Michael Holroyd (Introduction), patrick Hamilton (Author)

New
Paperback
2004
$10.32

The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid's secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.

Synopsis

The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid's secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 544
Edition: New ed.
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published: 06 May 2004
ISBN 10: 0099479168
ISBN 13: 9780099479161
Book Overview: 'One of our finest - and darkest - novelists' Observer

Media Reviews

Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected -- Doris Lessing The Times Patrick Hamilton wrote about pubs better than any other novelist... The wonderful 1935 trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is set in a pub off the Euston Road. Every detail is spot on Independent on Sunday A complex study of failed hopes and disappointed love Independent on Sunday Patrick Hamilton was a writer's writer... Seen as touchstones by authors from J.B. Priestley to Iain Sinclair The Times Hamilton writes about street life with an honesty and lyricism, an absence of sentimentality or fetish for squalor, that should make nearly every hard-boiled writer hang his or her head in shame -- Charles Taylor Salon

Author Bio

Born in Hassocks, Sussex in 1904, Patrick Hamilton was the youngest of three children. His parents, Ellen and Bernard Hamilton were published authors. At the age of seventeen he began to work as an actor and assistant stage manager for Andrew Melville. He then changed his career and worked as a stenographer. He published his first novel Craven House in 1926 and within a few years established a wide readership for himself. His first theatrical success was Rope (1929) on which Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name was based. Many novels followed, including Hangover Square, his trilogy of novels Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Slaves of Solitude, as well as radio dramas and plays, several of which were filmed, including Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. A celebrated 'bright young' novelist of the Twenties and Thirties, Hamilton was in tune with the times. He died on 23 September, 1962