The Winter Swan - Softcover

Youd, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911410067 ISBN 13: 9781911410065

Publisher: The SYLE Press, 2018

Synopsis

In 1949, Sam Youd – who would later go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – published his first novel. As he later said: I knew first novels tended to be autobiographical and was determined to avoid that. So my main character was a woman, from a social milieu I only knew from books, and ... [with] a story that progressed from grave to girlhood. When Rosemary Hallam dies, what she longs for is the peace of non-existence. Instead, her disembodied spirit must travel back and back, through two world wars and the Depression to her Edwardian childhood, reliving her life through the eyes of her husbands, her sons and others less immune than she to the power of emotion. And the joys and the tragedies which had never quite touched her at the time now pose a real threat to the emotional aloofness she has always been strangely desperate to preserve. ‘You remind me greatly of a swan, dear Mrs Hallam,’ her elderly final suitor had declared, ‘... effortlessly graceful, and riding serenely over the troubling waves of the world as though they never existed.’

About this title

About the Author

Sam Youd – who would go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm. His teenage love affair with science fiction was short-lived, and by his mid-twenties his ambition had turned to literary fiction. His first novel, The Winter Swan, came out in 1949; he brought out a total of ten non-genre titles, before turning his attention entirely to genre fiction. As a writer of genre novels his range was extensive. Alongside John Christopher the dystopian and young adult writer, there was William Godfrey the cricket novelist, Peter Graaf the thriller writer, Hilary Ford whose stories centred on female protagonists, Stanley Winchester who chronicled the carnal tendencies of the medical profession. But writing literary fiction meant a lot to him, and he turned his back on it reluctantly. The novels written under his own name are eclectic in their themes and outlooks: from a woman’s life told in reverse, to crises of faith amongst Jews and Catholics, to anti-heroes and deserters in World War II, to séances in post-war London. The last of the series, a bitter-sweet comedy of errors set in a large decaying country house, was published in 1963. He would continue to write, in a more popular vein, for several more decades.

Edition details

• Publisher: The SYLE Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1911410067
• ISBN 13: 9781911410065
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 292