DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOMEN HC – SAMUEL BECKETT

Beckett s first literary landmark (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua – a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba – wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapse into Dublin (New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.