Caught, Back, Concluding

Description

An omnibus edition of three quintessential novels from a unjustly neglected master of early 20th century literature. Features a new and unexpurgated text of Caught, published here for the first time. Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, so brilliantly evoked in Caught, gossip spreads like wildfire and the lives of two men are torn apart. In Back, Charley, an amputee, returns from a prison camp to his village and the grave of the woman he loved. Concluding was Green's own favourite of his novels and tells the story of a summer's day and a schoolgirl's disappearance. The text of Caught used in this edition is based on Green's original manuscript, which was censored by the publisher on first publication, but can be read now for the first time in unexpurgated form.

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 greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf -- James Wood Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century * Daily Telegraph * The finest living English novelist -- W.H. Auden The most gifted prose writer of his generation -- V.S. Pritchett His novels made more of a stylistic impact on me than those of any writer, living or dead -- John Updike