Nothing, Doting, Blindness

Description

A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, admired by Elizabeth Bowen and W.H. Auden, Henry Green is a neglected master of 20th century literature who is ripe for rediscovery. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY D. J. TAYLOR These three brilliant novels span Henry Green's career as a novelist and display his unique talents as a writer. Nothing is a tale of the merry-go-round of love, marriage and infidelity, and the ceaseless tussle of innocence versus experience. Doting sets the middle-aged male infatuation for pretty girls against the comfortable affection of wives and old friends, delving into the complications of burgeoning affairs and boring marriages. In Blindness, Green's first novel, a young man is blinded in a senseless accident but thereafter discovers new imaginative powers.

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973

The finest living English novelist -- W. H. Auden Experimental in tone; spare and sensuous by turns, irradiated by stylistic fireworks... his novels are dazzling exercises in form -- D.J Taylor * Independent * One cannot think of another modernist writer so neglected and yet so warmly humane * The Times * Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century... his writing is wonderfully seductive - as oblique, suggestive and full of surprises as life itself * Daily Telegraph * The most curious imagination in the English novel -- V.S. Pritchett