Old Soldiers

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Old Soldiers
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Paul Bailey
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:128
Dimensions(mm): Height 198,Width 129
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9781857025668
ClassificationsDewey:823.914
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Imprint Fourth Estate Ltd
Publication Date 6 April 2000
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Reissue to follow up publication of Paul Bailey's new novel Kitty and Virgil. Two of his previous novels 'Peter Smart's Confessions' and 'Gabriel's Lament', were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. First published in 1980, Old Soldiers is Bailey's most elegantly simple and perhaps most moving novel. The eponymous soldiers are two old men who (as his own father had been) are still haunted by First World War memories. Victor Harker -- a survivor from the Somme, dazed with grief after his wife's recent death -- gets entangled with another man, who splits himself into an 'unholy trinity' of parts; by turns a military man, a tramp and a poet, he performs each part enthusiastically, with a loving attention to verisimilitude. It's only at the end that we glimpse the sixty-year-old shame and grief which he has wasted a life time denying.

Author Biography

Paul Bailey is the author of At the Jerusalem (1967) which won the Somerset Maugham Award,Trespasses (1970),A Distant Likeness (1973), Peter Smart's Confessions (1977), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Old Soldiers (1980), and Sugar Cane (1993). He was the first recipient of the E.M. Forster Award and won a George Orwell Prize for his essay 'The Limitations of Despair'.