Concluding

by Henry Green, Eudora Welty (Introduction)

Overview

Henry Green considered Concluding the finest of all his books

Concluding—set in a single summer day—has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker—the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school—scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader’s eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227001
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/31/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books “as solid and glittering as gems.” He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.

Eudora Welty (1909–2001), the great novelist and short-story writer, won the Pulitzer Prize and believed that “all serious daring starts from within.”

Interviews

The love story is a delight, the social commentary sharp, the writing funny and fun—and yet the sorrow, even bitterness, at the core of this book about our perfidious species is inescapable and profound.

Editorial Reviews

"A novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall. Uncommonly close to the quick of experience, the sentences are short but they are glancing—the effect can be magically exhilarating, as when the knife thrower does not pierce but surrounds the living target, and it is the reader whose heart is thereby found. The sinister world of Concluding is beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom."

Eudora Welty

"The best English novelist."

W. H. Auden

"The characters and story come alive in an almost incredible way, quite beyond anything achieved by conventional methods of writing."

Terry Southern

"Lush enough to get lost in."

The Paris Review

"Henry Green’s silences are instruments of sublime communication."

Something from nothing - Times Literary Supplement - Becca Rothfeld

"Peculiar and beautiful—I love Concluding for the glorious, syntax-straining sentences that flare out of nowhere, and full of wild energies."

New Statesman - Lars Iyer

"The most gifted prose writer of his generation."

V.S. Pritchett

"Discomfiting social comedy—think Bunuel meets Forster or Beckett meets Mitford."

The New Yorker

"Green's books live on with ever-brightening intensity"

The Wall Street Journal

"Such rarity, such marvelous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish..."

John Updike

"The freshness and force of the work is somewhat uncanny in his gorgeous, enigmatic Concluding."

The New York Review of Books - Deborah Eisenberg

"A darkly comic romp of rare intensity that confounds as much as it astounds."

Star Tribune

Green's 1948 novel won high praise from the likes of Anthony Burgess and John Updike. The obtuse plot offers up an odd string of characters and events at a girls' school when two of the students go missing. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal