The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

Overview

In the West of Ireland in 1939 a young novelist rents a lonely cottage to write his new book in peace.

Almost at once, and without great resistance, he is seduced by the wife of the local squire. Harriet's husband is an older man - hot-tempered, impoverished, gone to seed - who once fought famously against the Black and Tans. Soon this eternal triangle becomes a local scandal, and the atmosphere of threat and violence, intensified by the approaching war in Europe, leads to a horrific murder.

The Private Wound is Nicholas Blake's last book, written with such intensity of feeling and depth of character that it is widely regarded as his best.


"Really splendid. When they come round to having a Crime-writer Laureate, Mr Blake's brow is there for the wreathing" - The Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448210442
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/17/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet and author, Cecil Day-Lewis, used primarily for his mystery series. Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904 - 22) was a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.