RETROS 

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

by Rebecca West (Virago £9.99, 160 pp)

A shell shocked soldier comes back from the trenches unable to remember the past 15 years.

At his grand country house, his vacuous, pretty wife, Kitty, has been awaiting his arrival, but Chris ignores her, instead demanding to see his first love, Margaret, with whom he shared an idyllic summer long ago.

When sweet-natured, gentle and long-married Margaret is summoned, snobbish Kitty shudders to see her shabby clothes, her red hands, coarse features and downtrodden boots.Her horror escalates as Chris lovingly embraces the impoverished Margaret, oblivious to her age. The pair sit beneath trees, conversing quietly, until Chris sleeps.

Exquisite writing with a heartbreaking ending.

THE AWAKENING

by Kate Chopin (Macmillan £9.99, 464 pp)

Alabama, 1899, is where Chopin’s sultry love story unfolds.Dutiful Edna, married to a doting, but dull, husband is befriended by a charming young bachelor.

For the first time in her life, she is overwhelmed by ‘the throbbings of desire’. She becomes infatuated, moody and sexually overwrought and starts railing against female servitude.Her dismayed husband pampers and humours her, unaware it’s her mid-life hormones causing the crisis.

The bachelor travels abroad to escape temptation.

Edna, alas, allows herself to be seduced by a smarmy bounder and her subsequent anguish has tragic consequences.

This feisty novella, applauded by feminists, scandalised the U.S.on publication.

THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT

by R. C. Sherriff (Penguin £8.99, 320 pp)

Lonely bachelor Hopkins, passionate about his prize-winning chickens, briefly survived a 20th-century cataclysm that wiped out Western Europe.Nearly 1,000 years later, in a Britain buried under impenetrable forests, Abyssinian scholars investigating dead civilisations and the lost cities of their ‘white men oppressors’ find his journal hidden in a vacuum flask.

Also found are mysterious tablets inscribed KEEP OFF THE GRASS and PECKHAM 3 MILES.Poor Hopkins, a pompous bore, suddenly blossomed during the catastrophe, as his journal reveals.

A terrific sci-fi classic that is funny, frightening and chillingly tinged with plausibility.