CHAMPION ROAD

A vast chronicle which stems from a tradition of life-drawn realism, invests a tremendous amount of solidity and vitality in its background of the lower English middle class, and achieves an outstandingly consistent character in Jonathan Briggs, whose bravado and belligerence, exuberance and endurance carries his story through some 600 odd pages. Ridden by a success drive which never falters, Jonathan beats his way up from a job in a cotton mill to the building trade, marries his Nellie who had also learned to fight for herself in a hard school and whose quick tongue gives him little peace. Jonathan's sharp dealings bring in bigger and bigger returns, earn him the resistance of Nellie who had never wanted much beyond the respectability of living on Champion Road, and as he moves up in the world- he moves up also in his taste for other women. But at the close, when he finds that his son Steven has been corrupted by his younger mistress, has gone into the black market, Jonathan deliberately forces himself into bankruptcy to turn his son's taste for easy money and return him to the girl be should marry... Taking on much of the energy and stamina of its central character, this is a hearty, holding story of a man of many ambitions and enterprises which will have the backing of the Literary Guild selection as an initial impetus.