A Handful of Dust
Chapman & Hall, 1934.
First edition. Original marbled cloth in pictorial dustwrapper in black and red. Frontispiece sketch of Hetton Abbey. A fine copy, with a little foxing to the page edges, in a superb, near fine dustwrapper which just shows a trace of wear to the spine ends and a couple of short closed tears, but is uncommonly clean and crisp.
One of the author's scarcest books, particularly so in such a fine dustwrapper. Critically regarded as the high point of Waugh's literary output and as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Mainly written in Morocco, the narrative seems to have come to Waugh quite easily, as he wrote to Katherine Asquith, "I peg away at the novel which seems to be faultless of its kind... Comic English character parts too easy when one gets be thirty." However, later he wrote "I have just killed a little boy at a lawn meet and made his mother commit adultery... so perhaps you won't like it after all." The title went through several iterations before purloining the phrase from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
Stock ID: 42578
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