Gilbert Phelps (1915–1993)

Imaginative and consistently interesting tale mostly told ina journal kept by an Edwardian man who finds an unknown people in an Andean valley. His stay in that valley remains through the decades after his return to England the most powerful experience of his life.

Phelps is very skilled in presenting details of odd, even uncanny, aspects of these people's lives in a way that lead the reader to suspect the explanation before it is given... And it's all to the good that a reader show more like--perhaps--the nephew of the framing narrative remains uncertain whether what the explorer found in the valley was real or hallucinated. The rigid conventionality of the narrator's' family and the rule of its matriarch are under-scored too boldly too many times but the story despite that never flags and remains convincing.

This seems an almost forgotten novel Too bad. that. If you spot it in an out-of-the-way place you might want to snatch it up: It's not anything like an overlooked masterpiece but it's an unexpectedly good book. show less

This book sets out to tell the story of English literature from Beowulf to the 1930s.

E-bay 28/07/2010