Wolf Solent

Often described as one of the great apocalyptic novels of our time, "Wolf Solent" is the story of a young man returning from London to work near to the school at which his father had been history master. Complex, romantic and humorous, it is a classic work combining a close understanding of man's everyday experience with a delicate awareness of the spiritual.

John Cowper Powys

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins

Maiden Castle

The novels of John Cowper Powys are like none other, containing the romantic extravagance and comic exuberance of the great nineteenth-century novels with the self-conscious depth and introspection of the great Modernists. Maiden Castle portrays in pointillist detail the complexities of sexual and romantic feeling that bedevil an eccentric cast of characters, and explores the psychological idiosyncrasies that fuel their hopes and dreams, fantasies and failures.At the center of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. Their awkward yet endearing efforts to create a life together unfold in counterpoint to the romantic and familial relationships that sizzle and simmer in the village of Dorchester. Yet even as the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith-readjusting their sights and affections-it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.4th in the series of novels

Picador

'Along with "Wolf Solent", "A Glastonbury Romance" and "Maiden Castle", this modern classic, originally published in 1934, forms the quartet that 'are just about the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky" - George Steiner, "The New Yorker'. Drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, Powys tells the story of Jobber Skald - a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate of the town because of the man's contempt for the workers of the local quarry - and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands. "Weymouth Sands" boasts a striking collection of human oddities, including a famous clown and his mad brother, a naive Latin teacher, a young philosopher, and an abortionist. Against the mysterious and haunting background of the sea, the sands, and the stones of Dorset coast, Powys weaves together his characters' ever-fascinating patterns of behaviour into an epic tale which depicts the power of Eros, the inscrutability of the universe, and the nature of madness, while highlightling Powys' deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity, and essential loneliness of human beings.

Weymouth Sands (Picador Books)

Literary

Macmillan

First published in 1929, John Cowper Powys's novel of Eros and ideas was compared with works by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence. Wolf Solent remains wholly unrivaled in its deft and risky balance of mysticism and social comedy, ecstatic contemplation of nature and unblinking observation of human folly and desire. Forsaking London for Ramsgard, Wolf Solent discovers a world of pagan splendor and medieval insularity, riddled by ancient scandals and resentments. And there this poetic young man meets two women—the sensuous beauty Gerda and the ethereal gamine Christie—who will become the sharers of his body and soul. "A novelist of great, cumulative force and lyrical intensity. . . . Out of his rhapsodic style and keen attentiveness to nature, he builds a tower of prose to match the firmament.”—Washington Post Book World

British & Irish

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A Glastonbury Romance, first published in 1932, is Powys masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury, and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mythical tradition from the remotest past of human history - the legend of the Grail. Powys's rich iconography interweaves the ancient with the modern, the historical with the legendary, and the imaginative within man with the natural world outside him to create a book of astonishing scope and beauty.

A Glastonbury Romance

Contemporary

Gerald Duckworth Co Ltd

Weymouth Sands

The novels of John Cowper Powys are like none other, combining the romantic extravagance and comic exuberance of the great nineteenth-century novelists with the self-conscious depth and introspection of the great Modernists. "Maiden Castle" is the story of Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a year-long unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. Yet even as the characters in Dorchester struggle with the perplexities of love, desire, and faith, it is the looming fortress of "Maiden Castle" that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.

Duckworth & Co.

Letters of John Cowper Powys to Glyn Hughes (Collected Letters of John Cowper Powys)

Biographies & Memoirs

Cecil Woolf

John Keats (Vol 1)

A philosophy of solitude

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Village Press

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Books by John Cowper Powys