Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl's Court - Softcover

Priestley, J.; Hamilton, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140081917 ISBN 13: 9780140081916

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1985

Synopsis

A pitch-black comedy set in London overshadowed by the looming threat of the Second World War, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square includes an introduction by J.B. Priestley in Penguin Modern Classics. London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his 'dead' moments, when something goes click in his head and he realizes, without a doubt, that he must kill her. In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evokes a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalising the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the war. Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. His plays include the thrillers Rope (1929), on which Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name was based, and Gas Light (1939), twice successfully adapted for the screen, the second time starring Ingrid Bergman. Among his novels are The Midnight Bell (1929); The Siege of Pleasure (1932); The Plains of Cement (1934); a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), adapted into a BBC mini-series in 2007; Hangover Square (1941); and The West Pier (1951), Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955), which together comprise The Gorse Trilogy. If you enjoyed Hangover Square, you might like Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the great books of the twentieth century' Independent on Sunday 'A masterly novel ... you can almost smell the gin' Keith Waterhouse, Spectator

About this title

Product Description:

Hangover Square: A story of darkest Earl's Court

Review:

"Rhind-Tutt's presentation of Bone's cinematic first-person narrative cleverly builds the tension of the mental conflicts which make up Bone's distorted vision of what is going on around him. It's a tense and gripping study of a drink-fuelled mental disintegration." (Rachel Redford, The Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0140081917
• ISBN 13: 9780140081916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288