April

This remarkable early novella by David Gascoyne has never before been published. Completed in 1937, when he was twenty, it analyses with great sensitivity the anguished relationship between the protagonists, Judith Irwin and Frederic Delaunay, in the colourful setting of 1930s Paris, where Gascoyne was living at the time. The descriptions of a city which was to be crucial in his development as a writer and translator give the text a particular immediacy, and its dialogue and narrative form show a far greater sureness and psychological complexity than is evident in his earlier novel, "Opening Day" (1933).