Herself Surprised; To Be a Pilgrim; The Horse's Mouth: Introduction by Christopher Reid(Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

The only one-volume edition of Cary's classic trilogy, in which three remarkably different characters narrate their interlocking stories across half a century in a gloriously inventive and dazzling triptych Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary’s trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters not only as they see themselves, but also as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force. From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, she takes a job while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household, which sets her on a colorful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara’s employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the center of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented, impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson—also a lover of Sara Monday—is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical. Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

About the Author :
JOYCE CARY (1888-1957) was born in Ulster, in northern Ireland, and grew up in London. He studied art in Edinburgh and in Paris before studying law at Oxford University. A poet, essayist, and short story writer, Cary is best known for his novels Mister Johnson and The Horse's Mouth. About the Introducer: CHRISTOPHER REID is the former poetry editor at Faber & Faber and the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award) and The Song of Lunch (which was the basis of a TV adaptation starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson).

Review :
“Joyce Cary is an important and exciting writer. . . . Rich writing full of gusto and accurate original character drawing.” —John Betjeman, Daily Herald “[The trilogy’s] excellence lies in the great skill with which a character is drawn in all its variety … and in the unhesitating and illuminating detail of half a century of English life.” —The Observer “[Sara Monday] is one of the most engaging and subtly realized heroines of recent fiction.” —The Atlantic “Acute, balanced, and at times brilliantly pure narrative, with a delicacy of insight that adorns everything [Cary] touches.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London) “These three novels [are] boldly original and durable masterpieces, whether they are taken separately or viewed together as a trilogy. . . . Cary’s gift for inhabiting a personality through his or her habits of speech proves inspired and indefatigable. . . . Such are the skill and originality of the writing that Herself Surprised may, in my view, be regarded as a kind of extended prose poem, transcending the genre of which it is ostensibly an example to become something unique among novels in the English language. . . . The Horse’s Mouth is a work of tremendous brio, very funny, linguistically inventive, full of glorious descriptive writing and dazzling rhetorical flourishes.” —from the Introduction by Christopher Reid