The Four Beauties [antikvár]

penguin books THE FOUR BEAUTIES Born in 1905, H. E. Bates was educated at Kettering Grammar School and worked as a journalist before publishing his first book, The Two Sisters, when he was twenty. In the next fifteen years he won a distinguished reputation for his stories about English country life. In 1941, as 'Flying Officer X', he wrote his two famous books of short stories - The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave - which were followed in 1944 by Fair Stood the Wind for France. These, and his subsequent novels of Burma, The Purple Plain and The Jacaranda Tree, and of India, The Scarlet Sword, stemming directly or indirectly from his war experience in the East, won him a new reputation and, apart from their success in Britain and America, have been translated into sixteen foreign languages. His writing took a new direction with the appearance in 1958 of The Darling Buds of May, the first of the Larkin family novels, which was followed by A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, and Ohl To be in England (1963). His most recent publications are The Blossoming World, The Triple Echo, A Lover's Flowers (all 1971), Song of the Wren, and The World in Ripeness (both 1972).