Andrew O'Hagan

a great masterpiece written at the age of 19 by the Salford writer, Sheila Delaney.

These were big influences on this novel.

In many ways, it's a novel about working class experience, about a group of boys trying to vault the fence and change the pattern and find their creativity and their freedom out there in the world in the 80s in a way that their parents never really managed to.

And so in that sense, it's a coming of age story, a coming of class story.

What happens when the features of a particular class, in this case the working class, change?

What happens when suddenly there's opportunities for those kids to go to university or become artists or even, God forbid, writers?

That's part of what I was trying to chart there.

Those texts, Saturday night and Sunday morning especially, which tells the story of Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham lathe turner who works in a factory,

who's trying to sort of change his life and open himself up to new experience.

But of course, there's a whole heavy world of working class tradition around him, which he has to struggle against.

So definitely those books and plays were in my mind as I was even drafting the book.

Well, I think it is, but it's also a questioning, as you've just pointed out, of those sometimes easy seeming relationships, but they can't be easy for a lot of the women around them, or indeed some of the other men who aren't part of the club.

If you take a book like On the Road, Jack Kerouac's famous book about the friendship between these two men as they travel across America, Dean Moriarty and Saul Paradise, these two heroic guys smoking and gunning their way through the Midwest into the South.

The problem there, which is very obvious when you read that very exciting book, is what about the women?

What about the girlfriends and the wives?

Who's looking after the children back there in Denver?

And the answer to that question in real life for Kerouac and his friend Neil Cassidy was Caroline Cassidy, who was back home with the children, stuck in Denver, worrying about money.

She didn't have the freedoms that they had in order to pursue their male camaraderie to the end of the road.

And she later wrote a book herself called Off the Road, which told a whole other story about what it's like to try and seek freedom in the midst of a kind of oppression.

So, you know,