A House of Children
Joyce Cary

A House of Children

A semi-autobiographical tale, awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which draws upon Cary's own upbringing to tell of a young boy's holidays spent on the Donegal coast. For six-year-old Evelyn Corner and his siblings Dunamara is an enchanted place . A world away from England, school and duty, they can wander at will all summer long, roam in wild packs with village children, clamber and climb like squirrels, swim and dive like otters. Around them always, investing every moment with beauty and magic, is the miraculous, metallic weight of the sea. Here is innocence and excitement. Here, above all, is anticipation. Only occasionally is there a hint of another life awaiting them, a life of adulthood, of responsibilities, perhaps even of disappointments….

Book Details:

  • Author: Joyce Cary
  • Published Year: 1941
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Phoenix
    • UK: Faber
    • Italy: Elliot Edizioni
Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris , before going up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13,the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes , before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, was wounded while fighting in the Cameroons, and returned to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. His time in Africa provided the inspiration for h...
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Book Reviews

  • "Whatever else you have been reading or thinking, it is difficult to believe that you will not find relief and dream the music of lost happiness in A House of Children.”"
    Spectator
  • "This lovely book is a clear call to happiness."
    LP Hartley