Description

‘Truly extraordinary … a very earthquake of a book … incontestably great’ The Times

Powys’ great visionary novel, now in Penguin Modern Classics

One of the great cult novels, a book that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime, A Glastonbury Romance is John Cowper Powys’ masterpiece. Set in a beautifully imagined fictional version of the West Country, the novel inhabits a twentieth century under siege from older and stranger forces.

An epic work of terrific force and lyrical intensity, interweaving the ancient with the modern, the novel probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of Glastonbury and its association with the legend of the Grail. At the heart of the book is the vision of one man, who wishes to make Glastonbury again the great pilgrimage centre it once was. But what really lies in this powerful landscape and why did so many men and women once come to it seeking redemption?

The edition used for this Penguin Classics edition is the original 1932 American text.

‘A masterpiece … Open any page and you can find something wonderful’ Margaret Drabble

‘Possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and one of the great mystical masterpieces of all time’ Colin Wilson

‘To encounter Powys … is to arrive at the very fount of creation’ Henry Miller

Publisher Review

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontestably great…. It is a big book, an important book * The Times * The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski — George Steiner * The New Yorker * John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world — Michael Henderson * The Telegraph * I read A Glastonbury Romance when I was 16 and it changed my life * Reverend Richard Coles * The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — George Steiner * The New Yorker * A masterpiece … Open any page and you can find something wonderful. — Margaret Drabble * Daily Telegraph * The Tolkien generation’s next adult novelist — Russell Hoban Possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and one of the great mystical masterpieces of all time. — Colin Wilson I believe that A Glastonbury Romance is one of the greatest novels in the world, to be classed with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. — J.D. Beresford