Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a disillusioned teenager growing up in a small Yorkshire mining town. Violence is commonplace and he is frequently cold and hungry. Yet he is determined to be a survivor and when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk he discovers a passion in life. Billy identifies with her proud silence and she inspired in him the trust and love that nothing else can. Intense and raw and bitingly honest, A KETREL FOR A KNAVE was first published in 1968 and was also madeinto a highly acclaimed film, 'Kes', directed by Ken Loach.

"This new stage adaptation of Barry Hines' well-known film and novel once again proves its gritty charm and popular staying power..." --Back cover.

Humankind's relationship to nature is governed by money in this first US publication of a classic by the greatest chronicler of the British working class

“There is no way but gentlenesse to redeeme a Hawke” Edmund Bert, 1619 Born and raised in the South Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, Richard Hines remembers sliding down heaps of coal dust, listening out for the colliery siren at the end of shifts, and praying for his father's safe return. It seemed all too likely that he would follow in his father's footsteps and end up working in the pits, especially when to his mother's horror and his own he failed the 11+, so that unlike his older brother Barry, who had passed the exam to grammar school and who seemed to be heading for great things, Richard was left without hope of academic achievement. Crushed by this, and persecuted by the cruelty of his teachers, Richard spent his time in the fields and meadows just beyond the colliery slag heap. One morning, walking in the grounds of a ruined medieval manor, he came across a nest of kestrels. Instantly captivated, he sought out ancient falconry texts from the local library, and pored over the strange and beautiful language there. With just these books, some ingenuity, and his profound respect for the hawk's indomitable wildness, Richard learned to “man”, or train, his kestrel, Kes, and in the process grow into the man he would become. Richard and his experiences with kestrels inspired Barry's classic novel A Kestrel for a Knave. When production began on what would become Ken Loach's iconic film Kes, Richard found himself training the kestrels that would soar on screen and into cinematic history. No Way But Gentlenesse is a superb, moving memoir of one remarkable boy's love for a forgotten culture, and his attempt to find salvation in the natural world.

This is the first full-length critical study of the work of Barry Hines, best know as the author of A Kestrel for a Knave

Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, adapted for the screen as Kes, is one of the best-known and well-loved novels of the post-war period, while his screenplay for the television drama Threads is central to a Cold War-era vision of nuclear attack. But Hines published a further eight novels and nine screenplays between the 1960s and 1990s, as well as writing eleven other works which remain unpublished and unperformed. This study examines the entirety of Hines’s work. It argues that he used a great variety of aesthetic forms to represent the lives of working-class people in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the post-industrial conclusion of the twentieth century. It also makes the case that, as well as his literary flair for poetic realism, Hines’s authorial contributions to the films of his novels show the profoundly collaborative nature of these works.

From the author of KESTREL FOR A KNAVE, a contemporary novel about a middle-aged rocker. After the death of his mother, a man begins to think about his teenage years as a Teddy Boy, something which is a far cry from his unemployed, middle-aged life.

This volume contains an anthology of essays, stories and poems by Barry Hines, the author of the much-celebrated 'A Kestrel For A Knave', better known as 'Kes'. Many of the pieces were written at the same time as this seminal novel and have never been published before.