A psychological study of marriage, loyalty and justice, A WAY THROUGH THE WOOD is a remarkable post-war novel.
‘A superb storyteller’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘I’d place him up there with Graham Greene’ Philippa Gregory
‘Balchin writes about timeless things, the places in the heart’ Ruth Rendell
‘Balchin has been absurdly overlooked for too long’ Julian Fellowes
James Manning is perfectly content. He has a successful life as a businessman in the city, a bright young thing of a wife, Jill, and an idyllic home in the countryside, where he is a local magistrate. The only fly in the ointment is the ‘Honbill’ – the Honourable William Bule, a gentleman with too much time on his hands.
When a young man is knocked off his bicycle and subsequently dies, James is sure that Bule is the culprit – after all, he saw a scratch on the Honbill’s car the day of the accident and it matches the description to a T. But events take an unexpected turn when James discovers that it was really Jill driving that night, and he is torn between obligations to his wife and to his profound sense of right and wrong.
A WAY THROUGH THE WOOD was the inspiration for SEPARATE LIES, a 2005 British film adapted by Academy Award-winning writer Julian Fellowes and starring Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett.
‘A superb storyteller’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘I’d place him up there with Graham Greene’ Philippa Gregory
‘Balchin writes about timeless things, the places in the heart’ Ruth Rendell
‘Balchin has been absurdly overlooked for too long’ Julian Fellowes
James Manning is perfectly content. He has a successful life as a businessman in the city, a bright young thing of a wife, Jill, and an idyllic home in the countryside, where he is a local magistrate. The only fly in the ointment is the ‘Honbill’ – the Honourable William Bule, a gentleman with too much time on his hands.
When a young man is knocked off his bicycle and subsequently dies, James is sure that Bule is the culprit – after all, he saw a scratch on the Honbill’s car the day of the accident and it matches the description to a T. But events take an unexpected turn when James discovers that it was really Jill driving that night, and he is torn between obligations to his wife and to his profound sense of right and wrong.
A WAY THROUGH THE WOOD was the inspiration for SEPARATE LIES, a 2005 British film adapted by Academy Award-winning writer Julian Fellowes and starring Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett.
Reviews
One of the hopes of British novel-writing . . . A writer of genius
The missing writer of the Forties . . . Balchin's professional skill gives a meaning to brilliance which the word doesn't usually possess
[An] inexplicably neglected author
Balchin writes about timeless things, the places in the heart
Balchin has been absurdly overlooked for too long
I'd place him up there with Graham Greene
A remarkable storyteller
A brilliant novelist . . . A writer of real skill
He tells a story gloriously
Balchin has the rare magnetic power that draws the human eye from one sentence to the next
Probably no other novelist of Mr. Balchin's value is so eminently and enjoyably readable . . . [He] never lets the reader down
Balchin has done so much to raise the standard of the popular novel
A superb storyteller
The novelist of men at work
Balchin can tell an exciting story as well as any novelist alive
Mr. Balchin is a writer of such considerable and varied gifts . . . He is certainly one of the most intelligent novelists
He can always be relied on to give us the set-up magnificently
One of the best writers, and certainly one of the best stylists, to come out of the war years
Perhaps the most successful British author to emerge during the war
