Description

Book Synopsis

Reissue to follow up publication of Paul Bailey’s new novel Kitty and Virgil. Two of his previous novels ‘Peter Smart’s Confessions’ and ‘Gabriel’s Lament’, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

First published in 1980, Old Soldiers is Bailey’s most elegantly simple and perhaps most moving novel. The eponymous soldiers are two old men who (as his own father had been) are still haunted by First World War memories. Victor Harker – a survivor from the Somme, dazed with grief after his wife’s recent death – gets entangled with another man, who splits himself into an ‘unholy trinity’ of parts; by turns a military man, a tramp and a poet, he performs each part enthusiastically, with a loving attention to verisimilitude. It’s only at the end that we glimpse the sixty-year-old shame and grief which he has wasted a life time denying.

Old Soldiers

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    A Paperback / softback by Paul Bailey

    £10.44

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    RRP £10.99 – you save £0.55 (5%)

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      Book details

      Publisher 4th Estate
      Published 6 April 2000
      ISBN-13 9781857025668
      978-1857025668
      ISBN-10 1857025660

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Reissue to follow up publication of Paul Bailey’s new novel Kitty and Virgil. Two of his previous novels ‘Peter Smart’s Confessions’ and ‘Gabriel’s Lament’, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

      First published in 1980, Old Soldiers is Bailey’s most elegantly simple and perhaps most moving novel. The eponymous soldiers are two old men who (as his own father had been) are still haunted by First World War memories. Victor Harker – a survivor from the Somme, dazed with grief after his wife’s recent death – gets entangled with another man, who splits himself into an ‘unholy trinity’ of parts; by turns a military man, a tramp and a poet, he performs each part enthusiastically, with a loving attention to verisimilitude. It’s only at the end that we glimpse the sixty-year-old shame and grief which he has wasted a life time denying.

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