Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life - Hardcover

Roald Dahl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394582659 ISBN 13: 9780394582658

Publisher: Knopf, 1990

Synopsis

Set in a small English village just after World War II, this collection of seven interrelated stories follows the lives and adventures of an offbeat, perverse cast of village characters

About this title

About the Author:

From the publication of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the 1960s to his death in 1990, Roald Dahl became the most successful children's author in the world. Nearly twenty years later, a fresh generation of children seek out his work with instinctive fanaticism. His creations endure - through Hollywood movies, theatre adaptations and musical works, but still most potently of all through the pure magic of his writing upon the page.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rereading the seven stories collected here, observes Dahl in his preface, fills the British author with "acute nostalgia and with vivid memories of those sweet days" after WW II, when he wrote for four hours a day and then set off for the rolling, rural landscape of England's Buckinghamshire, looking for mischief. Yet little to date in Dahl's ( My Uncle Oswald ) fictional universe has been merely wistful or gentle, and these delicious tales, based loosely on Dahl's youthful exploits in the countryside, are in fact full of his characteristic literary capers; the works build, by book's end, a rustic community populated by con artists, poachers and thieves, where each man buffets his neighbor for supremacy and even the most stealthy among them strives to outdo adversaries with pranks. "My dear friends, you've no idea the trouble these rascals will go to," declaims a bogus clergyman in "Parson's Pleasure," where scams give life its meaning. This man of the cloth is actually an antiques dealer who uses his costume to persuade suspicious countrymen to accept small sums for their inherited valuables, which bring him large profits. Here and elsewhere, Dahl shrewdly uses ostensibly simple fables as vehicles for richly mordant examinations of human foibles. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0394582659
• ISBN 13: 9780394582658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 179
• Illustrator: John Lawrence