Richard Adams THE GIRL IN A SWING First Edition
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Richard Adams THE GIRL IN A SWING First Edition
First UK edition, first print hardback of THE GIRL IN A SWING, by Richard Adams and published by Allen Lane/ Penguin Books Ltd., London in 1980.The book is in very good condition (Clean green cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine which has very light creasing to edges), with only minor wear to the illustrated dust jacket which is not price clipped (light creasing to the edges). There is a neat previous owner's gift inscription on the front board under the jacket flap. Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no other inscriptions. The jacket is protected in a clear plastic sleeve.
Richard Adams was born in Berkshire in 1920, and studied history at Bradfield and at Worcester College, Oxford. He served in the Second World War and in 1948 he joined the Civil Service. In the mid-1960's he completed his first novel, Watership Down, the story of which he originally told to his children to while away a long car journey. Watership Down was awarded both the Carnegie medal and the Guardian award for children's fiction for 1972. In 1974 he retired from the Civil Service to devote himself to writing and in that year published his second novel, Shardik.
His third novel, The Plague Dogs, followed in 1977 and then The Girl in the Swing (1980), Maia (1984) and Traveller (1988), and his other books include The Iron Wolf and Other Stories, The Bureaucats, A Nature Diary and, in collaboration with Ronald Lockley, Voyage through the Antarctic. He also collaborated on Nature through the Seasons and Nature Day and Night (with Max Hooper and David A. Goddard). He wrote the poetry for The Tyger Voyage, illustrated by Nicola Bayley, and The Ship's Cat, illustrated by Alan Aldridge, and edited an anthology of modern poetry entitled Occasional Poets. He has also written a volume of autobiography, The Day Gone By.
"The Girl in a Swing, Richard Adams's fourth major novel, is set, like Watership Down, in the Berkshire countryside. Yet the story could hardly be more different in content from his previous world-wide bestsellers. This is the haunting and haunted tale, set in the early nineteen-seventies, of a passionate love-affair, overwhelmingly beautiful but at the same time threatened by intimations of a frightening supernatural dimension.
Alan Desland, living in the country town of Newbury, has inherited his father's business in antique and modern ceramics. An unlikely candidate for the events that are to overtake him, Alan appears a stable, prosperous and scholarly, if slightly unworldly, young man. Only one hint of the danger that lies ahead has been revealed: from adolescence he has been the unwilling, and sometimes unwitting, victim of occasional psychic experiences, whether in dreams or in his daily life.
On a business visit to Copenhagen he meets Karin Forster, a German girl of extraordinary beauty. Their love is mutual and instantaneous. But apart from the glowing and passionate intensity of their pleasure in one another, what does Alan really know of Karin, of her life and origins? After their marriage in Florida and return to England it is Karin who acquires for almost nothing at a local sale the porcelain figure known as 'The Girl in a Swing' - a ceramic rarity of the greatest value.
Their happiness should be complete - but it is not: as their life together is invaded by a growing fear of what has remained unspoken between them, the scene gradually darkens. Omens of impending grief follow upon one another, the Eumenides gather for vengeance, the darkest shadows close in with the awful inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is a drama which mounts in tension to a terrible and horrifying climax.
As with all Richard Adams's novels, the story, at once ecstatic and deeply frightening, possesses several layers of menaing. From what world has Karin come? From our familiar world, or from some distant realm of pagan myth? Did it all really happen, or was it yet another of Alan's psychic nightmares - the most evil and destructive of all? The Girl in a Swing is a novel of great power, which will move and grip its readers in a way wholly unexpected from this gifted and versatile writer."
396 pages.
ISBN: 0 7139 1407 6
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Richard Adams THE GIRL IN A SWING First Edition
