MR WESTON'S GOOD WINE

Literature & Fiction

Powys, T. F.

Literary

Vintage Classics

Mr Weston's Good Wine is the unusual tale of the struggle between the forces of good and evil in a small Dorset village. Its action is limited to one winter's evening when Time stands still and the bitter-sweet gift of awareness falls upon a dozen memorable characters. During the book a child knocked down by his car is miraculously brought back to life; the sign 'Mr Weston's Good Wine' lights up the sky; and the villagers soon discover that the wine he sells is no ordinary wine.

Mr Weston's Good Wine (Penguin Modern Classics)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Beverages & Wine

Red Seal / Modern Age

Mister Weston's Good Wine (Modern Novel)

Heinemann Educ.

'Heavy clouds darkened the Dodderdown Church one Sunday in December. There was a baptism in progress that afternoon.' A little later on, 'What name?' he asked crossly. 'Mark' replied Mr Andrews, and then added a little louder, 'Mark only.' .... 'Mark Only, I baptize thee in the name of the Holy Ghost.' A mistake, of course, but this accident of nomenclature sets the principal character on a life of misfortune. Faber Finds are reissuing six works by T. F. Powys: Mr Tasker's Gods, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, Innocent Birds, Fables and God's Eyes A-Twinkle.

Mark Only

Faber and Faber

Inanimate objects take life and animals speak in T. F. Powys's collection of fables, which was first published in 1929: a dish-cloth and an old pan, lying on a rubbish heap, discuss the emotional intricacies of the household that has discarded them; the efforts of a determined spinster to marry off all her furniture end in tragedy; a rabbit takes advice from a viper to avenge the death of her son. Set in the Dorset countryside that also inspired Powys's novels, these are tales of morality, original and surprising, as all good fables should be.

Fables

A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their passions fair or foul use them to . . . A country village has a way now and again of clearing out all its inhabitants in one rush, as though it were grown tired of that particular combination of human destinies, and shakes itself free of them as a tree might do of unwelcome leaves..' The action of T.F. Powys' blackly absorbing, deeply characteristic Innocent Birds unfolds in the English croft of Madder, an ostensibly sleepy and settled milieu where the local people, nonetheless, are prone to acting on impulses and urges that have the power to bring themselves (and others) to ruin. 'There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "The Silent Woman" because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There is Maud Chick, an imbecile girl longing to have a baby, whom Mr. Bugby avoids after one experience; and Polly Wimple, prim Miss Pettifer's maid whom he does not avoid, to her great cost. A cormorant, far from the sea, that flaps and roosts arbitrarily at dusk whenever anything especially morbid or malicious is about to take place, is an apt metaphor for a shadowy flight of the author's imagination . . . ' Time, June 1926

Innocent Birds

Mockery Gap is the story of a tiny village on the coast of England, and a series of events arising out of the complex currents set flowing in this simple community by the chance remarks of a chance visitor. This is Mr James Tarr, a gentleman of ethnological pursuits with a desire to impress himself firmly upon people. He exercises this passion on the inhabitants of Mockery Gap, and the effect of carefully-weighted suggestion upon minds given to credulity and superstition makes for far-reaching and devastating consequences. "By all conventional standards, T F Powys is the least modern of writers. His novels and short stories are set in a landscape as far removed as possible from anything smart or urban - a fantastical version of English village life, in which human emotions work themselves out against a backdrop of brooding countryside . . . Writing as an allegorist or fabulist rather than any sort of conventional realist, Theodore Powys looks not to the present or the future, but to the past. He sets his tales in a grotesquely exaggerated rural landscape, not because he has any nostalgia for the way of life it may once have contained, but because, by doing so, he is free to strip human beings down to their barest elements - their lust, greed, cruelty and stupidity, and the mixture of dread and yearning with which they respond to the prospect of death." John Gray, New Statesman

Mockery Gap

"Mr Weston's Good Wine" is the unusual tale of the struggle between the forces of good and evil in a small Dorset village. Its action is limited to one winter's evening when time stands still and the bitter-sweet gift of awareness falls upon a dozen memorable characters. During the book a child knocked down by his car is miraculously brought back to life; the sign 'Mr Weston's Good Wine' lights up the sky; and the villagers soon discover that the wine he sells is no ordinary wine.

Mr. Weston's Good Wine

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

MR WESTONS GOOD WINE

RANDOM HOUSE UK

T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other―and Unclay is his masterpiece
New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.
First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light―Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The village teems with the old virtues (love, kindness, patience) and the old sins (lust, avarice, greed). What unfolds is a witty, earthy, metaphysical, and delicious novel of enormous moral force and astonishing beauty.

Unclay

United States

New Directions

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