The Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money and inspiration the world as seen though his eyes is both an outrage and a place of terrible beauty. Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which begins with Herself Surprised and continues in To Be a Pilgrim, brings a single character to intense and memorable life and can be read entirely on its own. But when read together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other. In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallenness and freedom. It is the masterwork of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and one of the outstanding landmarks of twentieth-century fiction. - Publisher.

The narrator, Evelyn, recalls the series of experiences during childhood summers at Donegal, which led to his perception of the world as an adult.

Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly. With no regrets, Sara reviews her changing fortunes, remembering the drudgery of domestic servitude, the pleasures of playing the great lady in a small provincial town, and the splendors and miseries of life as the model, muse, and mistress of the painter Gulley Jimson.

Joyce Cary (1888-1957) is indisputably one of the finest English novelists of this century. His reputation at his death equaled those of such contemporaries as Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. His exuberant style allowed him to create a vivid array of men and women whose stories embody the conflicts of their day and whose characters are beautifully realized. Written in his last years, his "Second Trilogy" (Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More) shows the mature Cary at his most brilliant, as he unfolds the tragicomedy of private lives compromised by politics and religion. While in his earlier trilogy (Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse's Mouth) he pits the visionary artist against an indifferent but by no means dull world, in his masterful "Second Trilogy" he maps that gray landscape between good and evil where life is at its most dangerous. The concluding novel in Joyce Cary's "Second Trilogy," Not Honour More (1955) takes up at the point Prisoner of Grace (1952) ends. The setting is Palm Cottage, the remnant property of the Slapton-Latter family and now the scene of an unhappy ménage consisting of Captain Jim Latter (retired), his wife Nina (née Woodville), and her former husband, Chester Nimmo. It is 1926, the year of the General Strike. Nimmo, once a Cabinet Minister, sees the situation as his chance for a political comeback, while Jim, head of the emergency civilian police, feels it his duty to take his stand, however desperate, against "the grabbers and tapeworms... sucking the soul out of England." For Nina, the trapped go-between, their inevitable clashes can lead nowhere but disaster. Not Honour More is Jim's book, "my statement, so help me, as I hope to be hung."

Originally published in 1958, this book by artist Joyce Cary examines 'the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it'. Cary speaks from practical experience when describing artistic inspiration and the ways in which varying arts present different forms of 'truth'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in art and the psychology of the artist.

Despite her love for Jim Latter, a young adventurer, Nina Woodville feels obliged to remain the wife of Chester Nimmo, an ambitious British politician

Chester Nimmo, the son of a stableman, recalls the hardships endured by his family.

Johnson may not be the Empire's most able servant, but he certainly is keen and is very good at replacing expertise with enthusiasm. How, though, to protect the Empire from its most devoted upholder? How, come to that, to protect Johnson from himself?

An American visitor and uninvited guest in the village of Nok, Marie Hasluck is an irrepressible anthropologist who believes that she has found the Kingdom of Heaven in the forests of Nigeria. There, to her eyes, the Birri tribesmen make love and war unfettered by the constraints and complications of Western civilisation; a state which Marie finds enviable and which she does her best to emulate. However, all is not well even in this pagan paradise: white prospectors are staking claims within Birri territory and the eccentric District Officer, Bewser, can no longer keep them at bay, for all his promises to the villagers. As the Birri warriors become increasingly enraged by the colonialists’ betrayal and as her own involvement with Bewser deepens, Marie finds that her position as a charmed but distanced onlooker is inevitably compromised.