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.
