The Alien Years

Collins, Sarah Mabel

Published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1949

About this Item

London, Hodder And Stoughton [Published date: 1949]. Hard cover, 223 pp. First Edition. Good in acceptable dust jacket. Tan cloth covered boards with green lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Light age spotting to edges of text block. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked. Dust jacket is split in two along spine and the bottom 4" of the paper on the spine is missing. There is another 4" slit on the back of the jacket running from the bottom of the flap crease and several other smaller nicks and chips along the edges. Price clipped. Moderate overall soiling to jacket as well, but the front of the jacket is still quite nicely preserved. Now in an archival quality (removeable) Brodart cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Mrs. Collins went over to Germany in 1938 to marry an Austrian in Berlin. This very human book is the description of her life and experiences during the next seven years in Germany, up to the moment when she was brought back to England by the British Army at the end of the war. [From back cover] "When we passed through Northern Germany and saw the utter devastation, it seemed to me as though we had left a land of plenty. I had realised that the want in Germany was great, otherwise women with little children would not have tramped so far to our lonely farmhouse to exchange their last remaining pieces of houselinen for bread. But that things were as bad as I saw them I had not guessed. The cities had become heaps of ruins, made grotesque by twisted girders which leered to the sky; stony deserts, desolate and awful. My heart contracted when I saw the pale, thin, barefooted children run to the troop-train to beg for crusts of bread; when I read the anguish and despair in the hollow eyes of the railway personnel; and saw the misery of the stricken land. A few days later we were on board the troopship, and looked back to the shores of the continent as it faded on the horizon. I had left England eight years before on the Europa to the strains of a German band, with Nazi flags flying high. I was brought back, after my eight alien years, by the British Army.".

Seller Inventory # 20231004009

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Alien Years
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication Date: 1949
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Acceptable