Of Love and Hunger
By Julian Maclaren-Ross
Richard Fanshaw has returned from a stint in colonial India. His past is shadowy, his present precarious. Eking out an existence of sorts in a shabby seaside town somewhere in the south of England, he finds employment flogging vacuum cleaners, door to door. A colleague, Roper, decides to sign up for a stint as a steward on a cruise liner. He makes the mistake of asking Fanshawe to look out for his wife Sukie – a ‘sultry looking piece’.
As the storm clouds of World War Two gather across Europe, and the Empire begins to crack, Fanshawe plays out his doomed love affair in the tea rooms and dingy boarding houses of the rainswept coast, against a backdrop of army recruitment posters and ever lengthening dole queues. Full of wit and downbeat charm, this wonderful gem of British humour retains a timeless appeal.
Julian Maclaren-Ross was a vivid character of pre-war literary London, a dandy and raconteur forever immortalized by novelist Anthony Powell as X Trapnell in A Dance to the Music of Time. Somehow in his chaotic life he managed to produce this great novel of Depression era England, originally published in 1947. This edition includes a fresh introduction by Maclaren-Ross’ biographer Paul Willetts, who published his study of the author Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: the Bizarre Life of Writer, Raconteur, Soho Actor Julian Maclaren-Ross in 2014.
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