BOYLE, Kay. Avalanche. London: Faber and Faber. 1944. Thin 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the striking typographic dust jacket. Very good. The cloth with some mild toning to extremities, the binding tight and very gently rolled. Some negligible marks to endpapers, else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), corners and tips a trifle rubbed, minor abrasion to front flap, with small closed tear to centre of the spine, but barely discernible in mylar cover.
An unusual novel in the author’s oeuvre, seemingly marking the birth of her anti-fascist political consciousness which would perforate her novels thereafter, but which also serves as the veritable anchor in her otherwise ripe literary career, mostly on account of one particularly scathing review by Edmund Wilson, who called it “nothing but a piece of pure rubbish” in the New Yorker. The detrimental gravity of his review could well have stifled Boyle’s reputation prior and since, but Avalanche was a best-selling novel at the time—the author’s only such accolade— and was founded in her genuine experience touring bases and observing Germany’s V2 bombing of London, hence many of its readers were soldiers perhaps not attuned to ‘worthwhile’ literature, all of which seemed to irk Wilson. Even the British edition ran into multiple printings, and this first printing is uncommon.
BOYLE, Kay. Avalanche. London: Faber and Faber. 1944. Thin 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the striking typographic dust jacket. Very good. The cloth with some mild toning to extremities, the binding tight and very gently rolled. Some negligible marks to endpapers, else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), corners and tips a trifle rubbed, minor abrasion to front flap, with small closed tear to centre of the spine, but barely discernible in mylar cover.
An unusual novel in the author’s oeuvre, seemingly marking the birth of her anti-fascist political consciousness which would perforate her novels thereafter, but which also serves as the veritable anchor in her otherwise ripe literary career, mostly on account of one particularly scathing review by Edmund Wilson, who called it “nothing but a piece of pure rubbish” in the New Yorker. The detrimental gravity of his review could well have stifled Boyle’s reputation prior and since, but Avalanche was a best-selling novel at the time—the author’s only such accolade— and was founded in her genuine experience touring bases and observing Germany’s V2 bombing of London, hence many of its readers were soldiers perhaps not attuned to ‘worthwhile’ literature, all of which seemed to irk Wilson. Even the British edition ran into multiple printings, and this first printing is uncommon.
