A Handful of Dust
Chapman & Hall, 1934.
First edition. Original marbled cloth in pictorial dustwrapper. Frontispiece sketch of Hetton Abbey. A near fine copy in a very good dustwrapper, which is a little tanned to the spine with some fraying to the spine ends and corners and the beginnings of a closed tear to the rear joint.
Waugh's fourth novel and seen as one of his scarcest.
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: 36799
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