Book cover for Eustace and Hilda by L. P. Hartley

Eustace and Hilda

2012 Released
876 Pages
17-18 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
NYRB ClassicsISBN 9781590175354

This three novel collection first published in 1944 explores a brother and sister’s coming of age and changing relationship in the English countryside and Venice

The three books gathered together as Eustace and Hilda explore a brother and sister’s lifelong relationship. Hilda, the older child, is both self-sacrificing and domineering, as puritanical as she is gorgeous; Eustace is a gentle, dreamy, pleasure-loving boy: the two siblings could hardly be more different, but they are also deeply devoted. And yet as Eustace and Hilda grow up and seek to go their separate ways in a world of power and position, money and love, their relationship is marked by increasing pain.

L. P. Hartley’s much-loved novel, the magnum opus of one of twentieth-century England’s best writers, is a complex and spellbinding work: a comedy of upper-class manners; a study in the subtlest nuances of feeling; a poignant reckoning with the ironies of character and fate. Above all, it is about two people who cannot live together or apart, about the ties that bind—and break.

L. P. Hartley

L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) was a British writer, described by Lord David Cecil as 'One of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original'. His best-known work is The Go-Between, which was made into a 1970 film. Other works include The Betrayal, The Brickfield, The Boat, My Fellow Devils, A Perfect Woman and Eustace and Hilda, for which he was awarded the 1947 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was awarded the CBE in 1956.

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