Little Boy Lost - Softcover

Laski, Marghanita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906462054 ISBN 13: 9781906462055

Publisher: Persephone Books, 2008

Synopsis

“When I picked up this 1949 reprint I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece. As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merit—although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one.”—Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.

Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 to a family of Jewish intellectuals in Manchester; Harold Laski, the socialist thinker, was her uncle. She was the author of six novels and a celebrated critic. She died in 1988.

About this title

About the Author:

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 to a family of Jewish intellectuals in Manchester; Harold Laski, the socialist thinker, was her uncle. She is the author of six novels and a celebrated critic. She wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot and two books on the nature of ecstasy. She died in 1988. Anne Sebba is a biographer, journalist and former Reuters foreign correspondent. She is the author of American Jennie: the Remarkable Life of Winston Churchill's Mother, published by Norton in 2007.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1906462054
• ISBN 13: 9781906462055
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232