Michaelmas term, 1940. 18-year-old John Kemp has come down from Lancashire to Oxford University to begin his scholarship studying English. But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable 'friend', and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange, complex world . 'The best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.' Sunday Times 'Absolutely contemporary - perhaps even prophetic.' Joyce Carol Oates 'Remarkable . A book about innocence.' Simon Garfield 'A cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.' Andrew Motion
Philip Larkin was an English novelist, librarian and celebrated poet, who has been awarded numerous honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in Coventry in 1922, he was educated at King Henry VIII School and Oxford University. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), as well as two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. Larkin worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. In 2003, he was chosen as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years by a Poetry Book Society Survey, while in 2008, The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer. In 2016, a memorial was unveiled at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Title: Jill
Author: Philip Larkin
ISBN: 9780571225828
Binding:
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 2005-03-03
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 1.0617 kg
'The qualities one has learned to value in his poetry are there: control of emotion and language, keen observation, and in particular the very precise expression of half-success, anticipated failure or sadness.' New Statesman; 'Jill is, in a sense, a kind of cryptic literary manifesto. It is a novel about writing, about discovering a literary personality, and about the sorts of consolation that art can provide.' Andrew Motion
