8vo. 306pp, [22]. Original publisher's red cloth boards blind stamped and lettered in brown. All edges shelf-worn with corners bumped, significant fading and staining to boards. Endpapers are toned though otherwise internally bright. Author's inscription to FFEP reads 'To Williamson, without reserve. G. C. H. Borley. 4-xi-20. Pencil notes by Williamson state he was given this copy by the author, who was a brilliant speaker and Rhodes scholar, on a Thursday night at the Tomorrow Club in 1920.

'Dedicated to nearly every soldier of the rank and file of the British, French, and American armies in France and Flanders... by a Comrade.' Gifted by the author to Henry Williamson. Not a great deal is known about the author, with only this title being attributed to a G. Colby Borley. A poem ‘Sapphic Ode’ appears in the June 1912 edition of The New Age journal under the initials G. C. H. Borley, which this copy is signed from, though there the trails runs cold. An existential mystery novel that follows the moral grapplings of protagonist 'Morales', and his shady cast of companions upon a cruise ship.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), novelist and writer on natural history and the English countryside, is predominantly remembered as the author of Tarka the Otter (1927) for which he won the Hawthornden Prize. His wartime experiences on the Western Front having altered his life inexorably, he spent the remainder of his post-war life in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, writing naturalistic novels very much in the romantic tradition.