A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

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Brought to you by Penguin.

VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels


‘I feel there are demons around.’

Everyone is thinking about Julius King. For comfortable, long-married Hilda and Rupert, he is a mystery. For Morgan, Hilda’s tormented sister, he is an obsession. For Morgan’s abandoned husband, Tallis, he is the source of ruin. For Simon and Axel, deeply in love, he stirs up jealousy and unease. What is Julius thinking about? He’s thinking about Hilda, Rupert, Morgan, Tallis, Simon and Axel, and they will not all survive his malevolent attention.

(C) Iris Murdoch 1975 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

It's easy to dismiss Murdoch; she was a clever woman, after all – frumpy, odd, middle-class. What could she know of life? But read her, then tell me: who knew the human heart better?
Guardian
The most important novelist writing in my time
A.S. Byatt
Above all, she was a consummate story-teller, prodigiously inventive and generous, in the realist tradition of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Independent
She could describe the ordinary and make it magical
Guardian
Her art was expansive, non-autobiographical and insistently inventive
Daily Telegraph
I was drawn to the intellectual speculation and psychological depth of Murdoch’s writing, and the experience of reading her brought the realisation that, for me, thinking would always be the greater part of reading.
Aminatta Forna
The effect of the novels is to convey to us reality, unfolded, shaking out light and air from between its newly perceived and freed layers
Candia McWilliam

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