Hardback, Macdonald, first edition, 1961.

Book condition: a very good copy with a fine dust wrapper, some slight foxing to upper and fore edges, internally tight and clean.

Volume 9 in the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series.

The publisher's blurb for the first edition (1961) states: 'Phillip Maddison, a young ex-soldier, at first works in Fleet Street on a Sunday newspaper while being distracted by love for an idealistic young woman who wants to alter him to her conception of what he should be. After the inevitable failure of these hopes he retires on his motor bicycle to a thatched cottage in Devon to live the simple life in company with an ex-R.A.F. poet who, say the villagers, writes with a pint-pot in his hand.

'Before long these two fall out, and Phillip, after an interval of living alone, enters upon a new dream of love. But he is compelled to shed some more of his illusions before his unsentimental friendship for another young visitor to the Devon sands ripens to bring a steady happiness to his life.

'The story is told against superbly drawn scenes of the times, evoking the literary world of London and of country people, from labourers and fishermen (including ex-urbanite "characters" who haunt the pubs) to fox-hunting and mountaineering young men and women of the period.'

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