Wolf Solent

'A great literary masterpiece' A. N. Wilson 
'A genius ... a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion' Margaret Drabble 
 
John Cowper Powys's epic Wolf Solent centres around the story of a young man returning to his roots in the West Country after ten years in London. Complex, romantic and humorous, it is peopled with memorable characters and filled with vivid, primitive descriptions of landscape. But beyond this powerful evocation of people and place, Wolf Solent is also a meditation on life and death, good and evil, body and soul, combining the earthy and everyday with the spiritual. 
 
'Wolf Solent is a stupendous and rather glorious book … as beautiful and strange as an electric storm' V. S. Pritchett

The finest novel by an Englishman in the 20th century

A powerful genius, whose novels stir us deeply

The novel is a momentous piece of work... of transcendent interest and great beauty

Wolf Solent is one of the very greatest 20th century novels... because it renders in an apparently traditional, fictional form some of the most distinctive and elusive experiences of late modern times

From the very first paragraph I was gripped. I read it in one sitting, sitting up into the night once I returned home to finish it. It embodies all Powys’s greatest characteristics: his profound understanding of human nature, his deep association with the English countryside and consonance with the English people; his relationship with mysticism and his atavistic regard for the past. But beyond that, his prose is perfect. It is one of the truly great English novels and should be a central part of our literary canon. I do not doubt that one day it will be

John Cowper Powys (Author) John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) was a novelist and poet. He lived a highly itinerant life, including some years as a successful lecturer criss-crossing the USA and Canada. His major novels include Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle.

First published in 1929, Wolf Solent was the first in John Cowper Powys’ great sequence of visionary works of fiction, set in Hardy’s Wessex but a Wessex now ravaged by the impact of the Great War and the curse of modernity. Both a lyrical story of the English countryside and an agonised account of life and love in the shadow of monstrous change, Wolf Solent is a cult novel like no other.

John Cowper Powys

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontestably great.... It is a big book, an important book

The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski

John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world

I read A Glastonbury Romance when I was 16 and it changed my life

The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky

A masterpiece ... Open any page and you can find something wonderful.

The Tolkien generation's next adult novelist

Possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and one of the great mystical masterpieces of all time.

I believe that A Glastonbury Romance is one of the greatest novels in the world, to be classed with Tolstoy's War and Peace.

One of the great cult novels, a book that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime, A Glastonbury Romance is John Cowper Powys' masterpiece. Set in a beautifully imagined fictional version of the West Country, the novel inhabits a twentieth century under siege from older and stranger forces. 
 
An epic work of terrific force and lyrical intensity, interweaving the ancient with the modern, the novel probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of Glastonbury and its association with the legend of the Grail. At the heart of the book is the vision of one man, who wishes to make Glastonbury again the great pilgrimage centre it once was. But what really lies in this powerful landscape and why did so many men and women once come to it seeking redemption? 
 
The edition used for this Penguin Classics edition is the original 1932 American text.

A Glastonbury Romance

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John Powys

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John Cowper Powys

Praise for A Glastonbury Romance

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontes ...

The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski

John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontes ...

The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski

John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontes ...

The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski

John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world

Books by John Cowper Powys

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