SMITH Settle, who earlier this year published Stan Barstow's autobiography In My Own Good Time, have reissued this 1968 novel.

A Raging Calm examines the passions which lie beneath the apparently unruffled exteriors of several people living in Cressley, the fictional Yorkshire town where Barstow set A Kind of Loving, which was later filmed starring Alan Bates and June Ritchie.

Their stories are interwoven neatly as Barstow backtracks to show overlapping events from the point of view of three different narrators.

He also offers an interesting picture of life in the mid-1960s when, a year into Harold Wilson's first Labour Government, the swinging and liberated Sixties were still a long way down the road from most small towns.

Updated: 08:52 Wednesday, July 31, 2002