Caliban Shrieks

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.

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 debut is a bold invitation to enter a whirlwind existence rarely seen in the literature of its era.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again 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.