The gripping courtroom drama of a Brooklyn-born Englishman who became the voice of Nazi Germany, by one of the most brilliant and erudite journalists of the century (The New York Times).
In 1945, The New Yorker commissioned star reporter Rebecca West to cover the London trial of William Joyce, who stood accused by the British government of aiding the Third Reich. Captured by British forces in Germany, Joyce was alleged to have hosted a radio program, Germany Calling, devoted to Nazi propaganda and calls for a British surrender.
The legal case against Joyce (known as Lord Haw-Haw for his supposedly posh accent) proved to be tenuous and full of uncertainties. Yet each new piece of evidence added to West's timeless portrait of a social reject who turned to the far right, who rose through the ranks without ever being liked, and who sought validation through a set of shared hatreds--of elites, of communists, and especially of Jews.
As a work of psychological suspense, Rebecca West's Radio Treason anticipates Truman Capote, Janet Malcolm, and Joan Didion at their best. As a study in political extremism, as Katie Roiphe writes in her foreword, It is as if Lord Haw-Haw has been transported from her time into ours.
The Return of the Soldier, the debut novel of one of the most lauded writers of the twentieth century, delves into the complex relationships between three women who are bound by friendship, family, and love to one soldier whose fate becomes their shared concern. When returns from the trenches of World War I, his mental trauma and amnesia testify to the horrors of war while simultaneously shedding light on the constraints in class-conscious England on the quest for happiness. A study of the human heart, The Return of the Soldier explores eternal themes with profound perception and insight. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed biographical timeline.
The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.
In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.
The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny. The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with mental trauma and its effects on the family, as well as the light it sheds on their fraught relationships.
Though initially reviewed by critics, literary scholars treating West's work tended to focus on her later novels and dismissed The Return of the Soldier until the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1982, and later into a stage musical of the same name in 2014 by Charles Miller.[1]
This book is a War Fiction, very nicely penned by the author. This book is a reproduction of an important historical work and War Fiction.
Rebecca West's debut novel explores the trauma of war and the impact of a soldier's amnesia on the women he returns to--his devoted cousin, his poised and proper wife, and the sweetheart he loved and lost in his youth.
Rebecca West was a pseudonym for Cicily Isabel Fairfield, a woman who had love affairs with Charlie Chaplin, H.G. Wells, and businessman, politician and newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook. She published her first novel, The Return of the Soldier, in 1918. Her works also include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Survivors in Mexico, The Thinking Reed, The Fountain Overflows and The Birds Fall Down. She may be best known for her studies of the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg: The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955). In 1959 West was made a Dame of the British Empire.