The Secret Journey

(Paperback, Main)

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Although admired by fellow writers like E. M. Forster, Henry Green and William Faulkner and winning comparisons with Joseph Conrad and Dostoyevsky, James Hanley is not as well known as he should be. Without doubt, he was one of the major British writers of the twentieth-century. Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing his Furys saga, making all five novels available for the first time. outlined his plan to his publisher: powerful, exercises a tremendous influence over her family. I shall show her under every light. I cannot attempt to describe in detail the amazing lives of these people, sometimes fantastic, but never, never divorced from reality. Working class lives are full of colour, of poetry, there is the stuff of drama in the most insignificant things.' Liverpool Irish family, is the dominant character. She has fallen on such hard times she is forced to borrow a few pounds from a moneylender; her debt accumulates, and gradually the whole of the Fury family become caught in the net. This is the main theme of the book but much else happens besides.

Author Bio

Almost all biographies give James Hanley's dates as 1901 to 1985. The date of his death is not in doubt, but as his son, Liam Hanley, has recently established he was born in 1897, and in Liverpool not Dublin as previously thought. James Hanley was a novelist and playwright. His output was prodigious: in addition to the five novels in the Furys sequence being reissued by Faber Finds, he wrote about twenty-five novels, sixteen volumes of short stories, six plays and seven books of miscellaneous writings. His early life was adventurous. He joined the merchant navy when seventeen (his sea-faring days were formative), jumped ship in Canada, joined the Canadian Army, fought in the First World War, and was gassed before returning to Liverpool in 1918. His novel, Boy, achieved notoriety when it was suppressed for obscenity in the 1930s. The unexpurgated edition is now in print with Oneworld Classics.