The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. A Conversation Piece. London: Chapman & Hall, 1957. First Edition. Pp, 184. A fine bright copy in pictorial dust jacket.

Gilbert Pinfold is a reclusive Catholic novelist suffering from acute inertia. In an attempt to defeat insomnia he has been imbibing an unappetizing cocktail of bromide, chloral, and creme de menthe. He books a passage on the SS Caliban and, as it cruises towards Ceylon, rapidly slips into madness.

“The very model of the modern paranoid novel” (New York Times) and an ambitious work of semi-autobiographical fiction from one of England’s greatest novelists.