Fiction

Happy Valley – Patrick White

Nobel Laureate Patrick White had Happy Valley published in the UK in 1939. During his life he refused to allow the book to be re-published. So, it took to this issue published by the unusual Text Publishing of Melbourne in 2012 for it to appear as a second edition.

Octavo, 407 pages plus catalogue, decorative endpapers. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.

White had spent time at a station in New South Wales as a jackaroo. He was not cut out for it. Nevertheless, the experience provided rather useful in writing this book … he had lived a colourful life to that stage and that would continue. Drawing on writers he had met and admired – Joyce, Woolf, DHL etc this is a complex novel of an exceptional standard.

Patrick White and his Happy Valley full of character and intrigue.

$40.00

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The Twyborn Affair – Patrick White – First edition 1979

A particularly good copy of this first edition published by Jonathan Cape, London in 1979. Octavo, 432 pages, clean as a whistle throughout.

A novel in three parts based first in the French Riviera before WWI: then a Sheep Station in the Snowy Mountain area of New South Wales after the war and finally in London in the lead up to WWII.

The protagonist although connected changes gender and more in each part, and the whole is a complex novel, challenging conventions as well as being wickedly humorous.

Patrick White at his best in the Twyborn Affair

$35.00

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Rough Water – Stories of Survival from the Seas – Clint Willis

A worthy soft cover published by the aptly named Adrenaline Books, New York in 1999. Octavo, 356 pages, fancy wrap card covers add to sturdiness. Very good to better copy.

Interesting mix of fact and fiction from Shackleton, Knox-Johnstone, Trumbull on the raft with Patrick O’Brian and Wauk (Caine Mutiny – let’s not forget Bogie!) then on to cold water and David Lewis etc. Glossary and bibliography at the end all help those new to the water.

Survival at sea all from your armchair

$25.00

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The Secret Pilgrim – John le Carre – First Edition 1991

A very nice first edition published by Hodder, London in 1991.

Follows the Russia House and the Karla trilogy and despite the whole of Smiley, some believe, and we do, that this was his best book to date.

Octavo, 335 pages a better than very good copy.

Smiley and Ned in their final years up in Scotland at the training college for spies. The format of the book uses a simple ploy “reminiscences” to produce in effect a book of perfectly connected short stories. The language and plot exceptional from the beginning to the gracious end.

John le Carre – hard for us to say but this one puts him ahead of Greene – his template so to speak = wonderful reading

$40.00

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Robert Louis Stevenson – Memories – 1926

A very unusually presented biographical work on Robert Louis Stevenson published by Peter Davies, London in 1926. Not a first printing but extremely scarce regardless.

Tall slim octavo, card covers with affixed wrap around picturesque cover with yap edges. Internally twenty five pages of tipped in images from original photographs with narrative opposite. A mixture of the people, mainly family, in his life … his life in Scotland and in Samoa [which probably saved him from ill-health] and his magnificent schooner “Casco”.

Some age to yap cover, internally pretty good, gift inscription on front ends.

An unusual piece of R.S.L. ephemera, near a hundred year old and of an emotional quality

Robert Louis Stevenson – His Life nicely presented

$35.00

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The Charge of the Light Brigade – Alfred Lord Tennyson

The most unusual and dramatic presentation of this high energy poem about the “Charge of the Light Brigade” against the Russian Batteries at Balaclava on 25th October 1854. It didn’t go well.

Landscape presentation with this unusual London Evening Star cover.

Published by Golden Press New York in collaboration with Paul Hamlyn in London in 1964. Unpaginated but twenty plus pages of verse strikingly illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen probably America’s best ever illustrators of book for young people … this one with a much more adult tone .. a work of art really.

Tennyson and his “Charge” best presentation

$40.00

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Happy Valley – Patrick White

The Twyborn Affair – Patrick White – First edition 1979

Rough Water – Stories of Survival from the Seas – Clint Willis

The Secret Pilgrim – John le Carre – First Edition 1991

Robert Louis Stevenson – Memories – 1926

The Charge of the Light Brigade – Alfred Lord Tennyson

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