I Left My Grandfather's House - Softcover

I Left My Grandfather's House contains much that is vintage Denton Welch an exhibition of his unique powers of observation, his obsession with food, his love of horror and his ambivalent attitude towards his own sexuality. But essentially it is a re-creation of the quite 'ordinary' adventures of a naive young man of eighteen on the edge of life written by his twenty-eight-year-old ghost quite literally a 'ghost' in the literary sense of someone who writes another's book, for not once does the adult author attempt to cloak his youthful unworldliness in latent maturity or to disguise that artless dialogue in which the young so naturally speak and which Denton Welch, when recalling his youth on more than one occasion, always reproduced so faithfully. On the contrary, the magical quality of this extraordinary and immensely entertaining document is contained in its permanent freshness, its restrained longing for fulfilment and its evocation of lost innocence of a whole world of freedom to travel at will, at really not cost at all, lost to all of us, forever. Michael De-le-Noy in his introduction to this edition This beautiful short novel describes a Sussex walking tour undertaken by Denton Welch at 18 years of age, before the tragic motor accident which was to leave him a partial invalid and which led to his early death when he was 33. Previously published only in a limited, privately printed edition, it is now available in paperback for the first time. Cover design by Mick Keates. The cover illustration is a painting by Denton Welch entitled by him A Lion and a Pilgrim, executed in 1944 while he was living at Pitt's Folly Cottage, Hadlow in Kent, and is reproduced by courtesy of Michael De-la-Noy. Also available from Allison & Busby is the first ever complete edition of The Journals of Denton Welch