Caught

by Henry Green

Published 1 December 1970
When the war breaks out, Rose, a well-to-do widower with a young son, Christopher, volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, and is trained under a professional fire officer, Pye. The two men discover that a quite different link already exists between them: it was Pye's strange, disturbed sister who once upon a time abducted Christopher and kept him in her room until Pye rescued the terrified child. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz the relationship between the two men develops as each of them grapples with his own troubled emotional attachments, the one to his dead wife, the other to his unhappy sister. Inevitably matters come to a head when history shows signs of repeating itself. The subtle handling of relationships, the brilliance of the dialogue and description - including one of the best accounts ever written of London under the Blitz - established Caught as one of Henry Green's most powerful novels.

Party Going

by Henry Green

Published 1 January 1951
A modernist "masterpiece" (The New York Times) that will appeal to fans of Downton Abbey and The Great Gatsby

Party Going
, published in 1939, is Henry Green’s darkly comic valediction to what W. H. Auden famously described as the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. London is sunk in an impenetrable fog. Traffic has come to a halt. Stranded in the train station and the hotel connected to it are a group of bright young things waiting to catch a train to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max is throwing a party. Green’s characters worry and wonder and wander in and out of each other’s company (and arms and beds), in pursuit of and pursued by their own secrets and desires.