CHRISTY BROWN - Down All the Days

London England, Secker & Warburg, 1970. Reprint, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Fair. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0436070901 Hardback Hardback. Slight foxing to end inside covers and edge. Wear and tear to D/J. 'He sat in the boxcar on the edge of the excited group of boys'. So opens the first chapter of this novel. He sat thus because he was an almost helpless cripple, scarcely able to particpate in the activities around him. Yet he is the focal figure of this book, a boy when the novel starts, on the threshold of manhood when it ends, fully possessed of the mind and emotions of a human being. Unable to join he, he observes from his boxcar with a heart at once tormented and serene, recording the actions and emotions of the sprawling family, of which he is part, in the Dublin slum where they live. Here is fact is Dublin in the forties and fifties, down all the days of its suffering and joys. Coarse, brutal, boozing, fornicating Catholic Dublin of the back streets and seedy pubs; with its splendours and miseries, its enormous zest for living. 266 pp.