An all-guns-blazing action thriller - tense, pacy and irresistibly page-turning. It was shortlisted for the first ever Booker Prize in 1969.
Barry England was born in London in 1932 and educated at Downside. He served as a subaltern in the Far East in the early fifties, then worked as an actor before starting a successful career as a stage and television playwright. His best-known play, Conduct Unbecoming, was a huge success in New York. England's first novel, Figures in a Landscape (1968), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a film by Joseph Losey.
Masterful and beautifully written. Riveting and compellingly
authentic. Grips you like a vice from the first page and never lets
you go
England's prose has the tough, spare elegance of steel scaffolding.
His vocabulary is wide, and used with arresting precision. The
speed of the narrative is impeccably controlled – long slogs over
country, moments of blind panic, passages of demoralizing
inactivity, hair-raising evasions, all building up to a central
set-piece in a burning field... A brilliant achievement
*The Times*
Shocked through with dramatic tension
*Irish Times*
Outstanding … I doubt if there has been a more impressive debut
since William Golding’s
*Daily Telegraph*
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