It is the freakishly hot, drought summer of 1921; dust-storms in London, parched and cracking earth, autumn tints in July. Holed up in a cottage in the Chilterns, a young writer strives to write the first great novel of the War, impelled by his own suffering. Outward events and inner crises deflect him from his purpose, and love intervenes in the form of two very different women. A visit to the hallucinatory wreckage of post-war Flanders brings strange repercussions in its wake. Everyone is in some way damaged by the terrible years of the War; in what sense can art be made out of such horror? Adam Thorpe's novel seeks to touch the marrow of this jazz-and-death-haunted period - ironically the most excitingly creative of our century. In a language deeply soaked in the time, and by means of a beguiling story which gradually haunts its own process, Nineteen Twenty-One vividly recreates the year in which The Waste Land was written, as well as offering a bright mirror to the inner and outer complexities of our own troubled times.
- ISBN10 0224052829
- ISBN13 9780224052825
- Publish Date 14 June 2001
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 August 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 384
- Language English