Old Soldiers by Paul Bailey

Old Soldiers by Paul Bailey

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.

Paul Bailey is the author of At the Jerusalem (1967) which won the Somerset Maugham Award,Trespasses (1970),A Distant Likeness (1973), Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Old Soldiers (1980), Gabriel’s Lament (1986), also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Sugar Cane 1993. He was the first recipient of the E.M. Forster Award and won a George Orwell Prize for his essay ‘The Limitations of Despair’.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781857025668
ISBN 10	1857025660
Title	Old Soldiers
Author	Paul Bailey
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	2000-04-06
Number of pages	128
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.