Winter Song (Furys Chronicle, Book Four)

First edition, second impression.  316pp.  Blue cloth-covered boards, gilt-stamped lettering on the spine.  8vo. Cloth a tad pushed at spine tips. Text block edges have a little faint spotting.  Internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  Dust wrapper moderating rubbed on extreme edges, with a couple of short nicks, short closed tear at spine head, a little shelf worn.  Dust jacket in an old and worn protective, removable clear film sleeve.

The Furys Chronicle is a novel sequence by James Hanley, originally conceived as a trilogy, then extended to four, and then five, standalone novels.  Published between 1935 and 1958, the sequence is set largely in the English town of Gelton, loosely based on Liverpool, and chronicles the lives of an Irish immigrant family in the 1910s and 1920s, exposing sectarian tensions and oscillations in economic conditions, and well as the affects of the first world war.  James Hanley (1897-1985) was a prolific novelist and playwright – some 25 novels, sixteen volumes of short stories and other books of plays and miscellaneous writings.  His novel, Boy, became notorious when it was suppressed for obscenity in the 1930s (it was published in Paris in 1931 by Jack Kahane, the same publisher who also accepted the UK-suppressed Lady Chatterley’s Lover).  Although well-respected by critics, his novels did not sell well during his life time and many are now very hard to find.