MICHAEL JOSEPH
FIRST PRINTING 1960
LONDON, UK
COVER ART BY ADRIAN BAILEY
Set against the background of a West Riding industrial town. A Kind of Loving is the story of a boy's physical infatuation with a girl whom he does not love. When, in his loneliness and romantic dream of the ideal mate, Victor Arthur Brown pursues Ingrid Rothwell he little realises the emotional crises in store for him nor how the events of the next two years will change his life; and in its examination of Vic's predicament the book takes on the wider significance of a study of some of the pitfalls which endanger youth as it fumbles its often uncharted way into adult life.
But this novel is no moral tract. The racy vernacular of the narrative is alive and vigorous and plunges the reader at the outset into the world of Vic's home, his working life, and his troubled relationship with Ingrid.
A Kind of Loving is a far cry from the civilised novel of manners, yet Victor Brown is no 'hero with a broken bottle.' He is to a great extent the prisoner of his own respectability - a respectability which, though it becomes strained to breaking point in the course of his relationship with Ingrid and her mother, the pseudo-refined and arrogant Mrs Rothwell, eventually combines with his innate decency and kindliness to determine him to seek an unselfish solution to his predicament. To do, as he puts it, 'what's right' and hope for 'a kind of loving' that will carry him through.
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