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'Birthday' is the long-awaited sequel to Alan Sillitoe's classic novel of the 1950s, 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'. Four decades on from the novel which was the forefront of the new wave of British Literature, we re-discover the Seaton brothers: they are older -- certainly; wiser -- possibly not. Arthur and Brian Seaton, one with an ailing wife, one with an emotional knapscak of failure and success, are on their way to Jenny's 70th birthday party. Jenny and Brian had, a year ago, experimented with sex -- semi-clothed, stealthy, with the bonus of fear. Arthur, of course, had cut a winning swathe through the married and unmarried women of Nottinghamshire. Life has changed. But there is still pleasure and still pain.

Letters from Alan McCulloch, one of Australia's foremost art critics, to Gwendolyn Thorne (Alan McCulloch's secretary from 1974-1982, when McCulloch was director of the Mornington Peninsula Arts Centre).

It is off-season in a remote Highland sea-port: 21-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling... Brutal, erotic, jarringly poetic and rich in blood-dark humour, MORVERN CALLAR is a powerful debut novel from a new Scottish writer.

Concerning Allen's sickness and the question of finding a replacement for his teaching job; and other personal matters.