Castle Corner
Joyce Cary

Castle Corner

Stretching from the fashionable homes of London to difficulties in a West African trading station and back to the sweeping beauty of rural Ireland, this is the vast, panoramic story of the Anglo-Irish Corner family. Its sweeping narrative follows the shifting fortunes of the two Corner brothers who succeeded old John in the family line: John Chas Corner, who inherited Castle Corner with its multiple responsibilities, a man of indestructible good will whose purse was as open as his heart; and Felix Corner, whose restless and inquiring spirit took him to West Africa where opportunity beckoned pioneers and speculators.

Around these two men, interwoven with their lives, involved in and shaped by the social and political ferment of the times, are other Corners, their tenants, servants and neighbours in Annish; and in Nigeria the African tribesmen under pagan and Mohammedan rulers who were accidental pawns in the white man’s compulsive drive for power and glory.

Book Details:

  • Author: Joyce Cary
  • Published Year: 1938
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Stratus
    • UK: Faber
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

  • "How entertaining it is! How brilliant in understated comment…how twisted and ironic in tenderness…how amusing and clearly pictorial."
    Spectator
  • "There is life in this book and there is colour; a rich and most satisfactory panorama."
    Sunday Times
  • "Mr Cary’s book is stupendous… There is an intellectual richness …pages of allusive anecdote, chat, picture, narrative, family history and a grim display of human squalor."
    Observer