Spring Song and Other Stories
Joyce Cary
Widely varied in every way, these thirty-four stories are united by their narrative brilliance; they range from ironic meditation on good and evil to joyful celebration of human creativity. They are set in Africa, in England, in the present or the past, in a child’s microcosm, a Nigerian bush-station, a businessman’s home, a soldier’s night under the stars. Their characters are as various as their settings – devoted mothers, children practicing to be grownups or in rebellion, harassed men trying to reconcile dream and reality. In length and technique they show the same extraordinary variety. The two long narratives of African life contrast with the miniatures such as ‘Romance’, the only short story that Time magazine had hitherto published.
Book Details:
- Author: Joyce Cary
- Published Year: 1960
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Rights Sold
- UK: Penguin
Joyce Cary
Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris , before going up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13,the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes , before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, was wounded while fighting in the Cameroons, and returned to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. His time in Africa provided the inspiration for h...
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Book Reviews
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"They break all the rules of short-story writing – or, occasionally and devastatingly keep them. Whether the rules are kept or broken the stories are extraordinarily vivid and powerful, the writing often magically good. What a writer we lost when Joyce Cary died."
Sunday Times