Back (British Literature)

By Henry Green

Book Overview

One-legged Charley Summers is finally home from the war, after several years in a German prison camp, only to find he must now deal with the death of his lover Rose. A shell-shocked romantic--slow, distant, and dreamy--he begins to have trouble telling Rose's half-sister Nancy apart from Rose herself, now buried in the village churchyard. Coping and failing to cope with the quiet realities of daily life, Charley's delusions elevate his timid courtship of a practical and unremarkable young woman into an amnesiac love story both comic and disturbing. A contemporary of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green was one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, and "Back" is his most haunting and personal work.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564785440
• ISBN13: 9781564785442
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.7" x 5.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Roses around the headstones

Two quick but more or less final conclusions on finishing this quietly devastating English novel from 1946: You are never once allowed to forget that you are reading words intricately and even eccentrically arranged by the inimitable Henry Green. Yet the quixotically deranged character of one-legged Charley Summers is rendered so vividly and so indelibly as to make the writing appear all but invisible.