Hardback, Faber, second edition, 1947.
Book condition: with a nice bright dust wrapper with some minor chipping, this is a very good copy.

The publisher's blurb to this second edition reads: 'This is the story of a poet who, leaving school to go to war, became an "ace" of fighter pilots, and when the war was over, found he could not adjust himself to the life of a civilian "in a dull world, a world half-dead". Haunted by the thought of those he had shot down in flames, identifying himself with them, and convinced that he was a coward and that all public reputation is false, Manfred was in revolt against the accepted ideas of the human world. Only in love could he recover his integrity . . .

'The scenes of the book are the seaboard of both Old England and New England; and the drama culminates in the wastes of the North Atlantic.

'Unsatisfied with the first draft of the book, Henry Williamson rewrote it in proof during the last three years; and after each revision the book had virtually to be reset.'

On its first publication in 1933 the book caused some controversy (because of unflattering descriptions of literary contemporaries using thinly disguised pseudonyms), and intrigued reviewers because of the mystery of its authorship. It sold well, as evidenced by the issue of this second impression in the same month as the book was published. Guesses as to the author included T. E. Lawrence and Robert Graves, much to the annoyance of the latter, who vehemently denied being in any way associated with it.

The background to the story is based on HW's extended stay in New York in 1931, and he began writing the book while still there.

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Gold Falcon.)