'Witty and unusual' George Orwell
'Magnificent' W H Auden

A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.

WITH NEW INTRODUCTIONS BY ANDREW McMILLAN AND JACK CHADWICK

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 breathless and dizzying modernist howl of a novel" - Guardian

"Equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant… [Caliban Shrieks] contains an energy that drives the reader on" - Observer

"A powerful, uncompromising account of working class life… [which] deserves reading and rereading" - Socialist Worker

"A sharp and compelling work of literary modernism… Caliban Shrieks…speak[s] powerfully to our own time" - Morning Star

"A singular book in both tone and structure... Hilton’s prose carries the twin forces of indignation and adverse experience" - The New Yorker