MANCHESTER PIECES

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Inscribed presentation copy. Original black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the illustrated dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Minor pushing to spine tips. In the near fine dustwrapper, showing just a touch of creasing to the upper edges. Not price-clipped (£15.99 to the front flap).

Inscribed by the author in black ink to the title page, "for Geoffrey / after 24 years! / love, Paul / ix. 96". The recipient is Geoffrey Wall, acclaimed biographer and translator of Gustave Flaubert. "This collection of Manchester Pieces, or pieces of Manchester, is an affectionate, deeply personal attempt to convey, through a variety of styles and perspectives, the equivocal idyll of a Manchester or Salford childhood. Like childhood itself the pieces are a series of 'tryings-out', or 'essays', borrowing from musical form and sharing with the traditional English essay their compactness and unpredictability. The essays merge into stories, as one melts into another. They reflect the workings of memory rather than the objective history of Manchester, and yet the two are so combined that the simple inventory of a local street or the contents of a shed is as evocative as a more precise recollection of schoolboy rivalry or a family Christmas. The Manchester of Thomas De Quincey or L. S. Lowry is as much a part of the fabric of place and identity as the Didsbury flat of the author's elderly uncle" (from the jacket).