The Gulls Fly Inland - Couverture souple

Thompson, Sylvia

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1912766868 ISBN 13 : 9781912766864

Editeur : Handheld Press, 2024

Synopsis

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England, looking after her American friend Annabelle’s baby. She is waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is serving with an ambulance unit in newly-invaded France, and of her surrogate mother Tante Julie, a rich démimondaine nursing her dying husband Otto on the French Riviera.

To maintain her sang-froid Blanche writes her journal, recalling how she met Vernon as a schoolgirl, her girlhood with Tante Julie in Paris and with her father in Italy, and her inexplicable betrayal by Tante Julie’s servants, who ensure that Blanche and Vernon fail to meet at a crucial point in their courtship. Vernon then marries the impervious Bostonian Leonora and Blanche believes him to be lost to her forever. Until Vernon realises that Blanche is about to sail back to Europe and appears in her stateroom asking her to stay … As the years wind forward Blanche and Vernon remain separated by other people’s machinations, and only the war might set them free.

Sylvia Thompson’s glorious, passionate novel of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War is a sumptuous romance set in the imperturbable correctness of interwar Paris, and in fast-moving 1930s London and Boston. Thompson’s storytelling is devastating in its emotional truth. This is a wonderful forgotten novel from 1941, now reissued with an introduction by Faye Hammill, Professor of English at the University of Glasgow.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Beautiful and wayward, Sylvia Thompson (1903-68) was an Oxford contemporary of Dorothy L Sayers and Vera Brittain, and published 14 novels from 1926. She married the artist Theodore ‘Peter’ Luling and lived in Surrey. She had three daughters, largely brought up by her own mother.

Faye Hammill is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her specialist areas are modernism and the middlebrow, periodical studies, and Canadian literature. She is author or co-author of six books, most recently Modernism's Print Cultures (2016), with Mark Hussey; Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), with Michelle Smith; and Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010). She is founder of the AHRC Middlebrow Network.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Handheld Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1912766868
• ISBN 13: 9781912766864
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 194
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible