First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established him as an astute chronicler of the human soul.Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.

    in 1908. He numbered among his many friends and acquaintances George William Russell (A. E.), E. M. Forster, Edmund Gosse, C. S. Lewis, and Walter de le Mare, as well as various Uranians such as Theo Bartholomew, Osbert Burdett, and Mark Andre Raffalovich.Despite his sixteen novels, his two autobiographies, and a range of other works, despite being a founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters and an honorary Doctor of Letters of Queen's University in Belfast, despite his novel "Young Tom" being awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Forrest Reid closely borders both oblivion and canonicity. However, this author, who has been aptly dubbed the "Arch-Priest of a Minor Cult," deserves reconsideration and perhaps a place in the pantheon of English letters."The Tom Barber Trilogy" - composed of the very distinct novels "Uncle Stephen" (1931), "The Retreat; or, The Machinations of Henry" (1936), and "Young Tom; or, Very Mixed Company" (1944) - is Forrest Reid's magnum opus. The present scholarly edition presents those three novels as clean texts (in Volume I), followed by a study of Forrest Reid and explanatory notes for the trilogy (in Volume II)."