BOOK DETAILS
Trade paper ISBN-13: 978-1943910250 List Price: $18.99 U.S. Pages: 240 Published: 2016 |
Mr Nicholas (1952)
Thomas Hinde Book Description
Mr Nicholas is a devastating study of the domestic horrors of English suburbia, personified by the Nicholas family and its snobbish patriarch, a petty tyrant whose greatest pleasure is to sip gin while bullying and arguing with his beleaguered wife and three sons, ‘intellectual, ineffectual’ Peter, rebellious Owen, and young David, whose relationship with a retired Army captain threatens to bring scandal on the family. With wry humour and surgically precise prose, Thomas Hinde paints an unforgettable portrait of an everyday monster, a character who is both contemptible and curiously sympathetic. Thomas Hinde (1926-2014) burst onto the literary scene at age 26 with his first novel, Mr Nicholas (1952), which was widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and hailed as one of the finest English novels of its day. This new edition, the first in over 35 years, includes a new introduction by Alice Ferrebe and a reproduction of the original jacket art by Peter Curl. Hinde’s classic thriller of suburban paranoia, The Day the Call Came (1964), is also available from Valancourt. |
reviews
“By the highest standards, a brilliant and beautifully written book, controlled, exact and illuminating . . . one of the few really distinguished post-war novels.” —Kenneth Allsop
“An expert novel. His storytelling is done in meticulously understated style, but beneath its bland surface, Mr Nicholas is relentless in its exploration of a quiet, homey little English hell.” -- Time
“This is without any question at all one of the best first novels of the year.” —C. P. Snow, Sunday Times
“Savage, brilliant.” --New York Times
“Far more than a bravura performance; it is achievement of a kind that begins beyond the point where many mature and accomplished novels leave off.”—James Hilton
“Mr Hinde is a precise, quietly accusing writer with a gift for producing a telling phrase and holding it, so to say, at arm’s length, as if it might suddenly turn and bite the hand that wrote it.”--The Guardian
“Gloriously explores—like a surgeon preparing to disembowel . . . a magnificent caricature, and both the detail of the scene and the climax of the story are something cruel. . . . The gift of Mr. Hinde is startling and obvious.’—Lionel Hale, The Independent
“A wonderful novel, full of passion but written subtly with humour, sympathy and restraint . . . Mr Nicholas himself is a brilliant portrayal of a fascinating monster.”—Financial Times
“The comedy is high and sinister, the jokes acutely and enduringly funny … I can think of no better rendering of Britain in the Fifties.” --Sunday Times (review of the 1980 reissue)
“A first novel of quite unusual quality … written with an easy control, vivid in description, detached, and dryly amusing … a novel of authentic seriousness, and the pleasure it gives as entertainment should not obscure the maturity of its judgments.”—Times Literary Supplement
“An expert novel. His storytelling is done in meticulously understated style, but beneath its bland surface, Mr Nicholas is relentless in its exploration of a quiet, homey little English hell.” -- Time
“This is without any question at all one of the best first novels of the year.” —C. P. Snow, Sunday Times
“Savage, brilliant.” --New York Times
“Far more than a bravura performance; it is achievement of a kind that begins beyond the point where many mature and accomplished novels leave off.”—James Hilton
“Mr Hinde is a precise, quietly accusing writer with a gift for producing a telling phrase and holding it, so to say, at arm’s length, as if it might suddenly turn and bite the hand that wrote it.”--The Guardian
“Gloriously explores—like a surgeon preparing to disembowel . . . a magnificent caricature, and both the detail of the scene and the climax of the story are something cruel. . . . The gift of Mr. Hinde is startling and obvious.’—Lionel Hale, The Independent
“A wonderful novel, full of passion but written subtly with humour, sympathy and restraint . . . Mr Nicholas himself is a brilliant portrayal of a fascinating monster.”—Financial Times
“The comedy is high and sinister, the jokes acutely and enduringly funny … I can think of no better rendering of Britain in the Fifties.” --Sunday Times (review of the 1980 reissue)
“A first novel of quite unusual quality … written with an easy control, vivid in description, detached, and dryly amusing … a novel of authentic seriousness, and the pleasure it gives as entertainment should not obscure the maturity of its judgments.”—Times Literary Supplement
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Hinde is the pen-name of Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, who was born in 1926 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a boys’ school headmaster. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, and began writing his first novel while serving as a teacher to a farmer’s two children. He worked as a civil servant and later as an executive of the Shell Company before becoming a full-time writer in 1960.
His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books, including biographies, history, and travel books, sometimes written with his wife, Susan Chitty. He passed away in 2014.
His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books, including biographies, history, and travel books, sometimes written with his wife, Susan Chitty. He passed away in 2014.
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