WYNDHAM, Francis.
The Other Garden.
First Edition of Francis Wyndham's The Other Garden; Inscribed by Him to Rolland Comstock
New York: Moyer Bell Limited, 1987.
$175.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-107839
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
First edition of Wyndham's first novel. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, "For Rolland from Francis." The recipient was the well-known bibliophile Rolland Comstock. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Jane Human.
Winner of England's Whitbread Prize for best first novel of 1987, this clear, spare volume brings us, at the outbreak of World War II, into the lives of the teenage narrator and Kay, his 30-ish friend of offhand behavior, laconic speech and deliberately shabby clothes. Kay, like the "other garden" near the narrator's house, is an attractive combination of the cosy and the strange. In this small English village, she and the narrator are passive rebels against conformity. We follow their intertwined stories throughout the war: Kay works in a local canteen and has a brief, devastating affair with an American G.I.; the narrator recuperates from a broken ankle after only three months as an army private; a homosexual Oxford friend goes off to a sanitorium to recover from TB (soon to be joined there by Kay, also suffering from the disease). For reasons never made entirely clear, Kay's parents, with whom she lives, reject and scorn her, until she is forcedbecause she adopts a dog who becomes the center of her lifeto move away to a difficult existence in blitz-beleagured London.
The Other Garden.
$175.00
In Stock
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