Party Going

A modernist "masterpiece" (The New York Times) that will appeal to fans of Downton Abbey and The 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.

Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford before working in his family’s engineering firm for most of his life while also writing novels. During World War II, Green served on the London Fire Brigade. He wrote nine novels between 1926 and 1952.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of six novels, the latest of which is Odysseus Abroad. He is also a critic, musician, and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies.