A sociopolitical misadventure from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Frank Dawley is a working-class escapee. After twelve years of spiritual nullification at a factory in Nottingham, five years in an alienating marriage, and two burdensome kids, Frank is finally free. He has quit his job, burned his possessions, and sold his car, and is hitching a ride to wherever the road will take him. Haunting Frank’s physical and existential travels is a ubiquitous inscription painted on nearly every street corner in England: BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Who is this Bill Posters, who is so relentlessly hounded by the authorities? To Frank, Bill—or William—becomes a symbol of the servile proletariat, the “put-upon dreg” whose hollow ideologies have bombarded Frank throughout his entire life. As an act of resistance, Frank becomes determined to reject—even to kill—the William Posters that lives inside of him. Ribald misadventures ensue as Frank finds his way from England to Spain to Morocco to Algeria—and into the beds of several married women. En route, he meets a revolutionary American who ends up engaging him in a high-stakes gunrunning mission. The first volume in an epic trilogy, The Death of William Posters sends Frank headfirst into the truth of what he’s been running away from all along. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.

The second novel in award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe’s William Posters Trilogy is an existential investigation of protest and revolution in 1960s North Africa and England Jewish dilettante Myra Bassingfield returns to England from Gibraltar with her four-week-old son. Frank Dawley, the child’s father and the anarchist antihero of The Death of William Posters, has disappeared into the African desert, where he is fighting with the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) for Algerian independence against French troops. Greeting Myra quayside as she disembarks from the ship is Frank’s friend, Albert Handley, an idealistic painter living in a chaotic house in Linconshire with seven kids, a bulldog, six cats, and two au pair girls. Albert’s brother, John, is determined to break from the family and he sets off for Algeria to track Frank down—but not before burning the Handley house to the ground. The Handley brood must then move in with Myra in Buckinghamshire, and by the time Frank finally shows up, they have formed a domestic cell of protest that may just plant the seeds of a new English revolution. From ramshackle life in a commune to undercover gunrunning, this is Alan Sillitoe, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, at his humorous and literary best. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.

A portrait of individual and communal struggles to maintain authenticity and revolutionary fervor in 1960s England from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe The final installment of the William Posters Trilogy revolves around the plights and foibles of the Handley family commune, which set up camp at the home of the wealthy Myra Bassingfield. There, painter Albert Handley is pursuing a whirlwind existence of art, sex, and chaotic domestic life. Of his seven children, four are giving him particular grief. His eldest son, Cuthbert, has been kicked out of theological college; his eldest daughter, Mandy, is pregnant by her unstable husband; and two of his younger sons, Richard and Adam, are pillaging army manuals for subversive and revolutionary ends. To top it all off, Myra’s lover, Frank Dawley, has returned from gunrunning in Algeria—and brought along his wife and two kids from Nottingham to live in the Buckinghamshire kibbutz. Collective cohabitation soon reveals its downfalls. And when a young Spanish anarchist arrives with assassination on her mind, her trunk full of notebooks may condemn Frank for a sin committed in the African desert. As the community hangs by a thread, the very notion of revolution comes under scrutiny, begging the question: Can the fire of life burn, even when its flame is no longer in sight? This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.