Other Garden - Softcover

Wyndham, Francis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099611600 ISBN 13: 9780099611608

Publisher: Random House UK, 1989

Synopsis

Chronicles the growth and development of a relationship between a young man in his late teens and Kay, a woman in her thirties who lives a tough bohemian existence

About this title

Review:

An eccentric woman in her 30s strikes a friendship with an adolescent boy in a small southern English town at the outbreak of World War II. The young man, who serves as the narrator, leaves to attend Oxford, while Kay, the woman, takes up with an American soldier. The patterns of life of the town and of the two friends are destroyed forever by the war, and Francis Wyndham's prose gives us a window into this time, and its demise. The novel is short and simple, yet filled with first-rate writing. The book won England's Whitbread prize in 1987.

From Publishers Weekly:

Winner of England's Whitbread Prize for best first novel of 1987, this clear, spare volume brings us, at the outbreak of World War II, into the lives of the teenage narrator and Kay, his 30-ish friend of offhand behavior, laconic speech and deliberately shabby clothes. Kay, like the "other garden" near the narrator's house, is an attractive combination of the cosy and the strange. In this small English village, she and the narrator are passive rebels against conformity. We follow their intertwined stories throughout the war: Kay works in a local canteen and has a brief, devastating affair with an American G.I.; the narrator recuperates from a broken ankle after only three months as an army private; a homosexual Oxford friend goes off to a sanitorium to recover from TB (soon to be joined there by Kay, also suffering from the disease). For reasons never made entirely clear, Kay's parents, with whom she lives, reject and scorn her, until she is forcedbecause she adopts a dog who becomes the center of her lifeto move away to a difficult existence in blitz-beleagured London. Wyndham (Mrs. Henderson; Letters of Jean Rhys) uses quiet, evocative prose to render a poignant story.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0099611600
• ISBN 13: 9780099611608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112