[In the following review, Cahill explores Sillitoe's affinity for depicting ordinary people in the stories comprising The Second Chance.]

In a long and prolific career that goes back to the mid-1950s, Alan Sillitoe has proved himself to be one of the most incisive recorders of what life is really like for the working class of England today. His twenty-fifth book, The Second Chance, is a collection of short stories written during the past twenty years. All the stories have been previously published in various periodicals, but this collection has special value because it focuses upon the persistent affinity which Sillitoe displays for the plight and torment of ordinary people whose lives are without dreams of happiness. The author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Sillitoe understands with the weight of deep personal experience the need for a second chance, the dim belief that tomorrow will be better.

The title story involves a bizarre longing to revive the dead. In southern England an elderly couple, the Baxters, who have lost their son Peter in the Battle of Britain, are living out their days in unabated grief. One day the husband spies a young man in a hotel bar who bears a startling resemblance to the dead Peter. The young man and the Baxters need “a second chance,” and the three form a complex alliance of feeling and adopted roles. The young man is really a cheap crook waiting to seize the best advantage of the Baxters. In a risky and suspenseful plot, Sillitoe turns the tables, and material and emotional greed topple each other. The plot owes something to Pinter in the metaphor of the intruder into house and heart. Sillitoe is at his very best as he explores the fear and abraded emotion of people feeding on each other.

In contrast to this novella-length narrative, all the remaining stories of the collection are brief, and the main intent of each seems to converge on several characters whose lives have crossed on the path of love. “The Meeting” and “The Confrontation” are among the best examples. These are stories which seem to rise out of Sillitoe's conviction that the lives of the most ordinary people may illustrate the grand compromise that is all our lives. No dreams are ever fulfilled, but always there remains the redeeming hope for “a second chance.”