"Remember the name John Braine. You'll be hearing quite a lot about him. Room at the Top is his first novel and it is a remarkable one . . . it's a long time since we heard the hunger of youth really snarling and it's a good sound to hear again." - "Sunday Times"
"The most discussed, debated and lauded first novel of the year." - "New York Times"
"This novel is brilliant . . . The observation is shrewd and the emotion and the comedy are so true it hurts." - "Daily Express"
Brought up amid squalor and poverty in a dead, ugly small town, young Joe Lampton has one ambition: to...

"A valid and important human situation . . . The book is vivid with the characteristic Braine sights and smells." - Kenneth Allsop, "Daily Mail"
"Triumphantly underlines the point that "Room at the Top" was no flash-in-the-pan. He alone, of the generation that has achieved celebrity in the last five years, is a genuine novelist in the great tradition." - "Yorkshire Post"
"A gifted and skilled writer . . . His prose is at its best extremely vivid." - Richard Hoggart, "The Guardian"
"The work of a real writer." - Peter Green, "The Telegraph"
"Once again Mr. Braine shows his...

"It deserves its success. It is very far from being a mere frivolous bestseller." - Anthony Burgess, "Observer"
"Alive from the first moment to the last." - "Listener"
"John Braine has brilliantly repeated the success of his first novel." - Arthur Calder-Marshall, "Financial Times"
In John Braine's remarkable first novel, "Room at the Top" (1957), he introduced readers to Joe Lampton, a ruthlessly ambitious young working-class man determined to reach the top at any cost. The book became a defining novel of the decade, selling over a million copies and being adapted for an...