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Narrator
Malcolm SinclairRuntime
8hr 49m
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Historical fiction
The second novel in Melvyn Bragg's brilliant and evocative Tallentire trilogy.
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.
(P) 2015 Hodder & Stoughton
Praise for A Place in England: Cumbrian Trilogy Book 2
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A graceful and confident writer; the little Cumberland town of Thurston during the slump years, the Second World War and after, is beautifully realised - The Observer
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Quite masterly - Daily Telegraph
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Places him solidly in the main tradition of English fiction, with an honourable ancestry through such disparate figures as Wells and Hardy, Dickens and Jane Austen to Henry Fielding - Tribune
Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg was born in Wigton, Cumbria, in 1939. He went to the local Grammar School and then to Wadham College, Oxford. He joined the BBC in 1961, and published his first novel, For Want of a Nail, in 1965.
He left the BBC and continued to write novels which include The Soldier's Return (WH Smith Literary Award), Without a City Wall (Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and Now Is the Time (Parliamentary Book Award 2016). A Place in England, Son of War and Crossing the Lines were all nominated for the Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes The Adventure of English and The Book of Books, and his first memoir, Back in the Day, was published in 2022 to critical acclaim.
He edited and presented The South Bank Show from 1977 and hosted the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time from 1998. He has now retired from both. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society and of The British Academy. He was given a Peerage in 1998 and a Companion of Honour in 2017.
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