THE ITALIAN GIRL

Chatto & Windus, London, 1964, 1^st.  Hard cover, 214 pages.  Very good; green boards with gilt lettering on spine; corners and spine ends lightly bumped; binding sound.  Price-clipped dust jacket has a few short edge tears and bit of chipping, bit of soil/toning on rear panel; jacket protected in mylar cover.  Prior owner’s name on FEP; remainder of interior clean and unmarked with lightly tanning pages.  Jacket and two wood engravings by Reynolds Stone.  “When Edmund returns to his family home in the North country, for his mother’s funeral, he intends to leave again by the next train.  But he finds himself the prisoner of a situation in which his brother Otto, his sister-in-law Isabel and their daughter Flora are all involved – a situation partly created by Otto’s new apprentice David, and by David’s wild sister.  Otto, an artist, has taken to drink, Isabel wants a life of ‘emotion and pistol-shots’.  Flora is not the innocent her uncle Edmund took her for – indeed, none of them is what at first he seems; and in the course of several dramatic epiphanies the life-shy Edmund discovers the most surprising truths, no only about his relatives, but about himself, while Maggie, the Italian maid, plays her unobtrusive but commanding part.” (from front flap)