Party Going [Paperback]

A modernist masterpiece (The New York Times) that will appeal to fans ofDownton AbbeyandThe Great Gatsby

Party Going, published in 1939, is Henry Green’s darkly comic valediction to what W. H. Auden famously described as the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. London is sunk in an impenetrable fog. Traffic has come to a halt. Stranded in the train station and the hotel connected to it are a group of bright young things waiting to catch a train to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max is throwing a party. Green’s characters worry and wonder and wander in and out of each other’s company (and arms and beds), in pursuit of and pursued by their own secrets and desires. Green’s novels are sufficiently unlike any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable...they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England.... Green’s human qualities—his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendor amid loss—make him a precious witness to any age.
 —John Updike

The most gifted prose writer of his generation.  —V. S. Pritchett

Each of Green’s books stands apart from the others as a separate feat in itself.  —Alan Pryce-Jones, The Observer

Party Going [is] Green’s masterpiece, about a huge assortment of people who are literally in a fog...stylish, unusual, sharply observed, funny (at times darkly so) and fashioned in a slightly eccentric way that seemed to suggest the obliqueness, the fluidity, the improvised quality of life itself.  —Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review

Party Going [is] dazzling in the poetry of its prose, a masterpiece of literary impressionism.... Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world wholƒ½