The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence, was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for the Second World War which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early Forties. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the unique opportunity of access to a literary and historical gem which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of our age

Carcanet's ROBERT GRAVES Programme brings into print, over the next decade, the bulk of Graves' writings in verse and prose in new editions with introductions by poets, scholars and other authorities.

Programme editor: Patrick Quinn