Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

(Paperback, Main)

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Boys and Girls Come Out to Play was Nigel Dennis's first acknowledged novel. It makes use of his years in America where he worked for eighteen years. It can be described as a satirical adventure story in which the main character, Max Divver goes to Poland in the spring of 1939 to report on the crisis. As well as exploring the character of American 'liberalism', he novel explains Max Divver complicated attitude to European life and politics. Starting in the stifling atmosphere of home and professional life among the New York intelligentsia, it crosses the Atlantic to a Polish hotel, portraying as it goes, in addition to numerous minor Americans and Europeans, Divver's frustrated wife and child, the expatriate American engineer who is fated to be Divver's nemesis, the engineer's young and desperate wife, and the all-powerful Mrs Morgan of the progressive Forward, whose neurotic son accompanies Divver to Poland and inherits the task of recording Divver's life and fate for the benefit of the younger generation. first published in 1949, Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (A Sea Change in the U. S. A.) won the Anglo-American novel award.

Author Bio

Nigel Dennis (1912-1989) was born in England and educated variously in Rhodesia, South African, Austria and Bavaria. He wrote too little but for all that there were three novels (and one that was disowned), four plays, a volume of poetry and three works of non-fiction. For twenty years he was the lead reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. His study of Jonathan Swift, one of his heroes as his own mastery of satire suggests, won the Royal Society of Literature award. Faber Finds is reissuing his three novels: Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, The Cards of Identity and A House in Order.