Concluding - Softcover

Green, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811227006 ISBN 13: 9780811227001

Publisher: New Directions, 2017

Synopsis

Henry Green considered Concluding the finest of all his books

Concluding―set in a single summer day―has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker―the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school―scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader’s eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books “as solid and glittering as gems.” He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.

Eudora Welty (1909–2001), the great novelist and short-story writer, won the Pulitzer Prize and believed that “all serious daring starts from within.”

Review

“A darkly comic romp of rare intensity that confounds as much as it astounds.”
- Star Tribune

“Discomfiting social comedy―think Bunuel meets Forster or Beckett meets Mitford.”
- The New Yorker

“Lush enough to get lost in.”
- The Paris Review

“Green's books live on with ever-brightening intensity”
- The Wall Street Journal

“Henry Green’s silences are instruments of sublime communication.”
- Becca Rothfeld, Times Literary Supplement

“A novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall. Uncommonly close to the quick of experience, the sentences are short but they are glancing―the effect can be magically exhilarating, as when the knife thrower does not pierce but surrounds the living target, and it is the reader whose heart is thereby found. The sinister world of Concluding is beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom.”
- Eudora Welty

“Such rarity, such marvelous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish...”
- John Updike

“The characters and story come alive in an almost incredible way, quite beyond anything achieved by conventional methods of writing.”
- Terry Southern

“The most gifted prose writer of his generation.”
- V.S. Pritchett

“The best English novelist.”
- W. H. Auden

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811227006
• ISBN 13: 9780811227001
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224