When Blackbirds Sing by Martin Boyd

When Blackbirds Sing

by Martin Boyd

Lansdowne Press, 1962 [First Edition], hardcover, dust-jacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, institute stamps and plate to front end-paper, dust-jacket a little crumpled (see photographs)

"At the outbreak of World War I, Dominic Langton leaves his wife to manage single-handed their remote Australian farm and returns to England to enlist in the British army.
Martin Boyd's novel traces both Dominic's military and spiritual odyssey.  Langton discovers a world which grudgingly accepts him; the doomed world of the landed gentry.  He returns to meet his ex-fiancee, Sylvia, with whom he has an affair.
In the end, however, he breaks with the past and all its involvements and achieves a new measure of wisdom when his appalling experiences on the Western Front teach him to reject the senseless waste of war which condemns millions of young men to pointless slaughter.  In these experiences Dominic finds his own integrity."