If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. His novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century.
Raymond Peronne has wealth, is bright, is devastatingly attractive to women: his fatal gift. Second son of a baronet, Perronne goes to Oxford (from which he is rusticated), then to New York (in the'20s and '30s) and is in Egypt during the war (moving in circles then, as in this novel, inhabited by such as Evelyn Waugh, Claud Cockburn and Robin Maugham.).
In tense anticipation we watch Peronne, for whom good fortune seems always imminent, fall at every point-until he finds the isle of Dominica and begins a love affair the like of which he has never known.
- ISBN10 1448202639
- ISBN13 9781448202638
- Publish Date 28 September 2011 (first published 1 January 1973)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Bloomsbury Reader
- Format eBook (EPUB)
- Pages 382
- Language English
- URL http://bloomsbury.com/