Kirjahaku

Lusty sheep farmers and their sensible wives, brainy engineers and over-dressed girls on the make - the whole district loves the parties Helen Bailey throws at Cotamundra station each Saturday. And everyone loves Helen Bailey - everyone, that is, except her husband Walter, who sits alone in the Australian heat, polishing his gun. For Helen, destiny seems to hold only embittered passion, desperate infertility and a lifetime of endless, boring tea parties. But this particular Saturday a young stranger comes to play tennis. And within the space of a single day, the lives and loves of all at the station are altered forever. A poignant portrait of a troubled marriage and a comic and loving evocation of life in the Australian Bush, All Day Saturday is a heady, atmospheric drama, where the fates of many are decreed in one day.

Australia, 1950. The rarely-spotted duck-billed platypus is rumoured to bring you luck. Sixteen-year-old June Westley is an ideal daughter - kind, considerate, loving, and far more at ease in the Bush pioneered by her forefathers than her own father, Arthur, who spends his days waxing the Buick in the Australian sun. One day she spots a platypus and, sure enough, luck seems to shine down on her when she falls in love with a young musician. At first their affair is enchanting and passionate; but soon they are forced to confront family hostility and jealousies, and the heritage of madness and homosexuality that threaten to destroy their relationship. A sympathetic picture of outsiders in a cloistered world, June in Her Spring is an idyllic and sensuous tale of the confusion, horror and tentative delights of first love.

Colin MacInnes was a sergeant in a Field Security detachment in the Second World War. In this imaginative record of actual experiences he describes the progress of his detachment through Holland, Germany and Belgium in a rapid succession of incidents, full of humanity, light-heartedness and wit. But it is a great deal more than just a fascinating account of the war; written in the 1950s, it was a sufficient distance away for the war experience to have been digested, yet close enough for it to be fresh. Running through the seemingly gentle stories he tells are undercurrents of emotion which are moving, disturbing and deeply poignant.

Tony Gould, in his biography of Colin MacInnes - Inside Outsider (reissued by Faber Finds) - is in no doubt, 'the volume of essays, England, Half English, contains the best of his writing. The range is impressive too: from expected pieces on popular culture (e.g. 'Pop Songs and Teenagers' and 'Sharp Schmutter'), to an essay on the London drinking clubs ('See You at Mabel's' - 'It's five past three in the afternoon, the London pubs have closed, you're dying for a drink. What happens?), and substantial articles on Nikolaus Pevsner (whom MacInnes described as this 'thoroughly inside outsider') and Ada Leverson (Oscar Wilde's 'The Sphinx' 'whose name,' as MacInnes says 'is so honourably remembered and whose writing remains disproportionately unread' - alas still true). 'To read England, Half English is to be reminded how few writers there are nowadays who are prepared even to attempt what should be the writer's first task; simply to tell us how we live ... who will bother to look at the way we dress and take our holidays, who will listen to the music that erupts from our loudspeakers, who will try patiently and assiduously to see if we can learn something from the crowds, you and I among them, who swarm on the pavement outside his windom.' Dan Jacobson, New Statesman'He was, in short, the first Pop anthropologist, the first post-war style sub-culture essayist: he created the trade.' Peter York, Harpers & Queen

Frankie Love, new to his profession as a ponce, seems to run his illegal life on strictly fair principles. Ted Justice, recently appointed member of the vice squad, finds his upholding of the law complicated by love for his girl. Love is travestied in the activities of the prostitute, justice mocked in the procedure of the vice squad, as Colin MacInnes writes with an authenticity which only an intimate knowledge of the seamier side of life can deliver. It is a world in which motives, friendships and values are never as simple as they seem.

London, 1957. Victoria Station is awash with boat trains discharging hopeful black immigrants into a cold and alien motherland. Liberal England is about to discover the legacy of Empire. And when Montgomery Pew, assistant welfare officer in the Colonial Department, meets Johnny Fortune, recently arrived from Lagos, the meeting of minds and races takes a surprising turn. Colin MacInnes gives London back to the people who create its exciting sub-culture. Hilarious, anti-conventional, blisteringly honest and fully committed to younth and vitality, City of Spades is a unique and inspiring tribute to a country on the brink of change.

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