The View From Pompey's Head

New York: Doubleday, 1954. Hardcover. Used - VeryGood/VeryGood. Book Club Edition. 5.75"x8.5"x1.25"; 409 pgs. Tan cloth boards with blue lettering. No markings throughout, but pages and boards have tanning and mild discoloration due to aging. Jacket has minor tearing at corners and some age tanning, but overall is in great shape. Spine straight, binding tight. Not x-library, unclipped, & unmarked. National Book Award for Fiction
Sweet, sleepy -- beautiful -- old Pompey's Head, South Carolina. Anson Page thought he'd ground it out of his life for good. Now a Manhattan lawyer representing a large publishing house, he's returning to his hometown after fifteen years to investigate the mystery surrounding one of his client's authors, a major American novelist who lives on nearby Tamburlaine Island. Both painfully familiar and irrevocably altered, the landmarks and people in Pompey's Head resurrect for Page the sweep of his past life. As he sets about resolving business matters, he collides headlong with the enduring power of lineage to determine belonging and dominance, exclusion and shame, and the realization that leaving does not mean escaping.

A deft interlacing of recollection and suspense, The View from Pompey's Head is Hamilton Basso's most popularly acclaimed novel. When first published, it spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into seven languages.