Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse's Mouth

(Hardback)

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Description

The only hardback one-volume edition of Cary's classic trilogy, in which three remarkably different characters narrate their interlocking stories across half a century in a gloriously inventive and dazzling triptych. From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara's employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented, impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson-also a lover of Sara Monday-is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical. Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once. Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary's trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force. 'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there-birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary

Reviews

Acute, balanced, and at times brilliantly pure narrative, with a delicacy of insight that adorns everything he touches. * Times Literary Supplement *
Its excellence lies in the great skill with which a character is drawn in all its variety and in the unhesitating and illuminating detail of half a century of English life. * The Observer *

Author Bio

JOYCE CARY (1888-1957) was born in Northern Ireland and grew up in London. He studied art in Edinburgh and in Paris before studying law at Oxford University. He joined the Nigerian political service in 1913, fighting in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, before returning to live in Oxford in 1920. A poet, essayist, and short story writer, Cary is best known for his novels Mister Johnson and The Horse's Mouth. INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY CHRISTOPHER REID is the former poetry editor at Faber & Faber and the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award) and The Song of Lunch (which was the basis of a film starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson).