The Years of Alison

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1961). First Edition. Hardcover. [spine slightly turned, minor soiling to edges of text block; jacket is moderately edgeworn and lightly scuffed, one tiny tear at top of rear panel, internally tape-reinforced across top of spine]. Novel set in England during the inter-war years, "the story of the Cowdreys of Somerset, but most particularly of Alison, who found the courage and personal stamina to face a changing, sometimes ominous world, a world soon to be dominated by the march of Nazism." A free-spirited, non-conforming sort, she rebels against her upper-class upbringing, getting expelled from boarding-school, having a youthful romance with a French boy (alors!), then running off with an American journalist to participate in the Spanish Civil War. "Then, in the last interlude before the outbreak of hostilities and the involvement of England in its national struggle, she returned to London, matured by the events she had experienced." The book is described in the jacket blurb as the author's "first major novel" (most of his earlier books seem to have been about animals, including a couple about Siamese cats), and it appears to have been both the beginning and end of his career as a "major" novelist -- he subsequently returned to working in a "minor" key, turning out three children's books about a cat (yes, a Siamese) named Tootoo. Chetham-Strode (in England he was always hyphenated) was primarily a playwright, whose 1946 hit "The Guinea Pig" was filmed in 1948, and also did a bit of writing for radio and the cinema. (I do feel compelled to note here that "The Guinea Pig" was not about the eponymous animal, but rather about a badly-behaved English public schoolboy.) Oddly, although the author was an Englishman through and through, this book was published first in America, preceding the British edition by a year. It was also issued in paperback in 1964, and can still be easily found in that format, but for reasons I can't quite suss out it's very scarce in any hardcover printing. .