Editions

How Sleep the Brave

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099442035

  • Length: 208  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 149g

  • RRP: £9.99

How Sleep the Brave

  • Complete Stories of Flying Officer 'X'

Heroic and moving accounts of the R.A.F. in war time by the author of Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Darling Buds of May

'After 60 years of writing and reading, I would place H.E. Bates as one of the best short-story writers of my time' Graham Greene

First published under the pseudonym of Flying Officer X, H. E. Bates’s stories of the heroic exploits of British bomber crews during the Second World War created a sensation when they appeared in 1942, selling over two million copies all over the world. Bates lived among the painfully young pilots and recorded their lives, and those of their loved ones, with an emotional attention that deeply moved the generation that lived through the war, and an intensity that reverberates down the decades.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099442035

  • Length: 208  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 149g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • These stories, wry, often poignant, still move the reader today

    The Times

  • After 60 years of writing and reading, I would place H.E. Bates as one of the best short-story writers of my time

    Graham Greene

  • One of the most vividly evocative writers of English ... able to conjure up in a handful of words whole landscapes and moods

    Listener

  • H.E. Bates could achieve a quality of lyrical intensity that few contemporary novelists can match

    Times Literary Supplement

  • He was without an equal in England in the kind of story he had made his own and stood in the direct line of succession of fiction writers of English countryside and that includes George Eliot, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence

    The Times

More from this Author

About the Author

H.E. Bates

H. E. Bates was born in Northamptonshire in 1905. He published his first novel, The Two Sisters, when he was twenty, and for the next decade built up a reputation as a writer of great versatility. During the Second World War Bates was commissioned by the RAF as a short story writer, where he wrote the acclaimed How Sleep the Brave and The Greatest People in the World. His most popular creation was the effervescent Larkin family about whom he wrote five novels including The Darling Buds of May and A Little of What You Fancy. In 1973 H. E. Bates was awarded the C.B.E. He died in 1974.

H.E. Bates

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Features

H. E. Bates on the real-life inspiration behind the Larkin family

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of H. E. Bates' first novel in the Larkin series, The Darling Buds of May, the author shares the real-life inspiration behind the Larkin family: 'There is something of myself in Pop Larkin'.

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