THE DEVASTATING BOYS: And Other Stories

First edition, first printing. Original purple cloth with gilt lettering on black to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Stanley Hickson. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean without inscriptions or stamps. Spotting to the upper edge of the page block. In the bright, clean, neatly price-clipped dustwrapper, showing the merest of fading to the spine. A couple of small nicks to the lower edge of the front panel. A very attractive copy.

Taylor's fourth volume of short stories. Margaret Drabble, in the introduction to her selection of Taylor's stories (NYRB, 2014) writes of how they "move from the era of war damage and postwar austerity through rebuliding and reconstruction to an age of growing affluence, of coffee bars, transistor radios, motorways, and the package holiday in the sun", while her great contemporary, Elizabeth Bowen, wrote that '[s]he makes one feel, "here is something new; something that has not been perceived or said before"'.