To the Dark Tower

Description

In a lonely house above Dartmouth Bay lives General Sir Hugh Weir: a solitary figure, austere to the point of vanity and as contemptuous of weakness in others as in himself. Behind him he has left a trail of broken lives - friends, lover, wife, son. Now two more people begin to feel the force of his restless compelling nature: Shirley Forsdike, a neurotic, hero-worshipping schoolmistress who has yet to meet him, and Frank Cauldwell, an impecunious young writer. Out of the shifting conflict raised by their emotions and experiences Francis King constructed a taut novel of passion and despair.

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge

'Mr King writes with such sensitivity, penetration and emotional delicacy' Daily Telegraph