publisher once declared that of all the books written by JB Priestley, seven should never be out of print.

Such was Priestley's breadth and productivity during 54 years of publication that a casual skimmer such as myself is hard put to guess those magnificent seven.

Nevertheless, here goes: The Good Companions (1929), his first novel; English Journey (1934), Priestley following in the footsteps of previous chroniclers of the nation such as William Cobbett; I Have Been Here Before (1937); When We Are Married (1938); An Inspector Calls (1946), three great plays; and Bright Day (1946). My seventh would be any collection of his essays that included the scripts of those wartime talks.

Perhaps conscious of the criticism aimed at him in the late 1950s - that Jack Priestley was too comfortably middle-of-the-road, a Jack of all styles but master of none - Priestley, as though to prove his intellectual calibre, fired off a weighty tome: Literature and Western Man.

"It damn near killed me," he later said, probably with a smile while puffing on his pipe.

His son Tom Priestley says his father ranked himself a better playwright than novelist, but of his novels he was most taken by The Image Men - a satire about image-making and advertising. After that he liked Bright Day.

Having read most of the opening three chapters of the forthcoming new edition by Great Northern Books between doing other things at work, I put the volume to one side, deciding that it was too good to be read in that kind of desultory fashion.

Bright Day starts out by telling the story of 50-year-old Hollywood script-writer Greg Dawson, despatched to a seaside hotel in Cornwall to bash out a shooting script for a film to be called The Lady Hits Back.

Dawson, brought up in the wool town of Bruddersford (Bradford), meets a couple at the hotel and seems to know them from those years in Yorkshire. This recollection sparks off a series of flashbacks about people and places in Bruddersford before the 1914-18 war.

The T&A's late theatre critic Peter Holdsworth, who knew JB, said that although Bright Day is not autobiographical Priestley drew marvellously on his knowledge of the city of his youth to give colour to the story of the disenchanted script-writer.

"Lost in its smoky valley among the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddersford is generally held to be an ugly city; and so I suppose it is; but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated but often enjoyed: it was grim but not mean. And the moors were always there, and the horizon never without its promise."

Place names have been disguised, but may be discovered in an attached essay at the back of the book together with photographs of Bradford before 1914.

This memorial volume, which contains tributes from the great and the good, does JB proud. The novel itself deserves to be savoured in a big comfortable armchair, preferably on one of those autumn days - a Friday - when the summer is not yet quite over and the weekend beckons.

Never mind Jimmy McGovern and Robbie Coltrane...Bright Day is the real cracker.

l Bright Day, by JB Priestley, published by Great Northern Books on Monday at £14.99.