“How entertaining it is! How brilliant in understated comment…how twisted and ironic in tenderness… how amusing and clearly pictorial.”
The Spectator
“There is life in this book and there is colour; a rich and most satisfactory panorama.”
The Sunday Times
“Mr Cary’s book is stupendous… There is an intellectual richness… pages of allusive anecdote, chat, picture, narrative, family history and a grim display of human squalor.”
The Observer
Stretching from the fashionable homes of London to difficulties in a West African trading station and back to the sweeping beauty of rural Ireland, this is the vast, panoramic story of the Anglo-Irish Corner family.
Its sweeping narrative follows the shifting fortunes of the two Corner brothers who succeeded old John in the family line: John Chas Corner, who inherited Castle Corner with its multiple responsibilities, a man of indestructible good will whose purse was as open as his heart; and Felix Corner, whose restless and inquiring spirit took him to West Africa where opportunity beckoned pioneers and speculators.
Around these two men, interwoven with their lives, involved in and shaped by the social and political ferment of the times, are other Corners, their tenants, servants and neighbours in Annish; and in Nigeria the African tribesmen under pagan and Mohammedan rulers who were accidental pawns in the white man’s compulsive drive for power and glory.
The Spectator
“There is life in this book and there is colour; a rich and most satisfactory panorama.”
The Sunday Times
“Mr Cary’s book is stupendous… There is an intellectual richness… pages of allusive anecdote, chat, picture, narrative, family history and a grim display of human squalor.”
The Observer
Stretching from the fashionable homes of London to difficulties in a West African trading station and back to the sweeping beauty of rural Ireland, this is the vast, panoramic story of the Anglo-Irish Corner family.
Its sweeping narrative follows the shifting fortunes of the two Corner brothers who succeeded old John in the family line: John Chas Corner, who inherited Castle Corner with its multiple responsibilities, a man of indestructible good will whose purse was as open as his heart; and Felix Corner, whose restless and inquiring spirit took him to West Africa where opportunity beckoned pioneers and speculators.
Around these two men, interwoven with their lives, involved in and shaped by the social and political ferment of the times, are other Corners, their tenants, servants and neighbours in Annish; and in Nigeria the African tribesmen under pagan and Mohammedan rulers who were accidental pawns in the white man’s compulsive drive for power and glory.
