Martin Boyd: A Life by Brenda Niall

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Foxing to top foredge. Dust jacket is now enclosed in a glossy protective cover. Interior and binding are still very good.

Martin Boyd (1893-1972) was one of the generation whose lives were changed by World War I. He served in a British regiment, survived the trenches in 1916-17 and joined the Royal Flying Corps.

The pacifist beliefs which emerged from that war experience are central to his fiction, as they were to his life. Boyd was a complex personality: witty, generous, sociable, yet deeply reserved. He looked for his 'home of the spirit' in many places: an Anglican monastery, London's West End clubland, a Cambridge village, and an old family house in Harkaway, Victoria, and among English expatriates in Rome.

In a fine study of a man and his work, Brenda Niall re-creates the Melbourne where Boyd grew up just before World War I and traces his development as a writer during his restless years as an expatriate. (publisher blurb)