A rediscovered Modernist gem: a lushly written short novel of roiling family tension on an English farm, back in print for the first time in decades
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'The Crazy Hunter is the story closest to perfection that I have ever read' Katherine Anne Porter
'Few writers have been more skilled at conveying an underlying emotional violence imperfectly concealed by the conventional politenesses' Margaret Atwood
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At 17, Nan wants to leave the family farm and go to study. Caught between her powerful mother and yielding, drunken father, she absorbs the tensions of their divided household and dotes on her new gelding, a gift from her father. When a sudden accident leaves the horse blind, Nan's mother insists he must be put down, initiating a power struggle that brings the family's conflicts explosively to the fore.
First published in 1938, The Crazy Hunter is an electrifying short novel-sharply observed, psychologically astute and morally complex. Written in lush, entrancing prose, it is the finest work by a significant modernist writer.
An exquisite depiction of a doomed love affair, set in noirish 1950s New York
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'A little masterpiece' Elizabeth Bowen
'Moving and convincing ... a lyrical, intelligent book' Guardian
'My favorite of the Hayes novels... I have read and reread this small book as though it were a poem rather than a fiction: not a description of experience but the thing itself' Vivian Gornick, New York Review of Books
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In a Manhattan bar, a middle-aged man tells a young woman of his love affair with a lonely divorcee; of how one night she was offered one thousand dollars to sleep with a stranger; and of how he and she would subsequently betray each other in turn. In Love is an indictment of, and an elegy to, a love affair that was doomed from the start; an exquisitely honest and painful depiction of heartbreak.