Zephyr Books
Ashgrove's Zephyr Books imprint presents classic novels of the 20th century in new editions.
The Rack
A. E. Ellis
The Restored Edition
Introduction and Restoration
by Alan Wall
The novel that Graham Greene thought should have earned the author the Nobel Prize for Literature.
There are certain books which we call great for want of a better term, that rise like monuments above the cemeteries of literature: …Great
Expectations, Ulysses;
The Rack, to my mind is one of this
company.’ Graham Greene
The Rack is the greatest novel of medical confinement in the English language. Its subject is life inside Alpine sanatoriums for tubercular patients in the years after the Second World
War and it explores that dehumanizing world of bewilderingly incompetent doctors, institutional indifference and endless medical procedures upon patients
pre-occupied with their symptoms and their sexual desires. It is an account, as vivid as any could possibly be, of actual
experience transmuted into fiction by a rare and powerful mind.
More than 25,000 words cut from the original manuscript for the book’s first publication in 1958 have been restored in this new edition of an acknowledged classic. The text presented
here now displays far more of the author’s range in portraying human warmth and engagement as well as further revealing his darkly comedic talent.
A. E. Ellis was the pseudonym of playwright and novelist, Derek Lindsay, who was born in 1920. Orphaned at the age of three, he was brought up by an
aunt. After serving in World War II, during which Lindsay rose to become a captain, he returned to England and attended Oxford University.
When he was stricken with tuberculosis, Lindsay entered a sanatorium in the Alps, where the years of his slow cure would provide the
inspiration for his only published novel, The Rack. The book received great acclaim on its publication.
Paperback 458pp
ISBN 9781853981609
£24.99 in the U.K. only
The Hooligan
Rudolf Nassauer
Introduction by Michael Moorcock
A demanding but outstanding novel of Hitler's Germany that takes us into the mind of a fascist functionary.
A most distinguished and important book …a penetrating study of the nature of violence and cruelty, it concerns
the basis of a sane society as well as the phenomenon of a mad one. [The Hooligan] is a book of great power
and beauty but also of importance for our imaginative understanding of the world we are living
in. Iris Murdoch
Originally published in 1960 and written in a classsically precise style, The Hooligan is a Dostoevskian study of Nazi’ racial ideology.
The psychologically-inadequate protagonist Andreas Febler, who is a clerk of the Town Council, falls under the influence of lower-class malcontents in the early days of the
Nazi movement and eventually becomes the deputy commandant of a concentration camp. Rich in symbolism, the novel details the physical and psychological construction of a camp and offers a unique
insight into the specious reasoning of those who wished to see themselves beyond good and evil.
Rudolf Nassauer was born in Germany in 1924. In 1939, he came to England with his family and was educated at St
Paul’s School. He married Bernice Rubens in 1947 and pursued a career in the wine trade. The Hooligan, ten years in the writing, was the first of his seven published novels. A lifelong
supporter of the arts and young artists, he died in 1996.
Paperback 262pp
ISBN 9781853981586
£9.99 in the U.K. only
The Horses of Winter
A. A. T. Davies
A novel that shocked readers on its publication in 1967 through its exploration the world of cruelty and domination in the landscapes of the U.K.
Winter came early that year. Freezing fog swept across London, knife-chill choking with cold and dirt, squeezing the hearts out of the dying, the weak-lunged, the old. The ant-swarm of people moved gropingly through the fog-muddied streets, slowly and painfully as if they were walking through dirty water, hunched and scarved figures coughing sour grey sputum into glove-held handkerchiefs…
First published in 1968, the focus of A.A.T. Davies’ hard-hitting novel is the relationship between Peter Keevil, disillusioned scholar and connoisseur of the perverse and the futile, and John Morann, sensualist and compulsive seducer. Their lives interlock and are finally centred on a special and violent crime; deliberate, chosen and callous. For Morann this act is revenge for the mutilated Anna, whose love had seemed pure and resusitating; for Keevil it provides the liberation of a self-determined identity, that of the criminal. Their psychological race towards a mutual victim is tense and horrifying.
On its initial publication, The Horses of Winter shocked and disturbed many readers Yet, in the tradition of Swift, Lawrence and Orwell, Davies is a writer whose bitterness of vision is complemented by a profound understanding of – and sympathy for – his characters, who are rendered with insight, humour, and a poet’s feeling for words and images.
A.A.T. Davies, an Englishman, was an academic for 30 years holding posts at
Heidelberg University and the University of Groningen. After The Horses of Winter appeared he withdrew from the world of publishing in a
self-imposed exile. Anthony Davies died in Holland in 2016.
Paperback 344pp
ISBN 9781853981883
£11.99 in the U.K. only