The Last September, The Death of the Heart

In one hardcover volume—the two most popular novels by one of the greatest twentieth-century novelists, whose psychologically rich stories of lost innocence combine sharp humor with a devastating gift for exposing hidden motivations

The Last September is a portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life is shadowed by the impending doom of history. In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, young Lois’s guardian, Sir Richard Naylor, and his family and friends stubbornly carry on with their tennis parties and dances, all while knowing that British rule in Ireland—and with it, their privileged way of life—is about to end.

The Death of the Heart, perhaps Bowen’s masterpiece, is a devastating story of adolescent love and the betrayal of innocence. When orphaned sixteen-year-old Portia arrives in London and falls for an attractive and carefree cad, their entanglement threatens to shatter the carefully built illusions of everyone in their politely treacherous social world.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.ELIZABETH BOWEN was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She wrote many acclaimed novels and short story collections, was awarded the CBE in 1948, and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973.

TESSA HADLEY is a British author who has been awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and the O. Henry Prize (twice). Her books have been longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Guardian First Book Award, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her most recent book, After the Funeral, was named a best book of the year by Time, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Vogue.  She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.Intoduction by Tessa Hadley