Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man [Faber Modern Classics] (4-Jun-2015)

Book 1 of 3: The George Sherston Trilogy

First published in 1928, now public domain in the United States and Canada. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognized as a classic of English literature. In the years since its first appearance, it has regularly been a set text for British schoolchildren.

Sassoon elected to publish Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man anonymously. It is a depiction of his early years presented in the form of an autobiographical novel, with false names being given to the central characters, including Sassoon himself, who appears as "George Sherston". He was motivated to write the work by a war incident, when a fox was loose in the trenches and one of his friends shot and killed it. However, the book draws heavily on his pre-war life, with riding and hunting being among the favorite pastimes of the author.

In this first novel of the semi-autobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the Edwardian English countryside. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's reminiscences about childhood and the beginning of World War I are channeled through young George Sherston, whose life of local cricket tournaments and fox-hunts falls apart as war approaches and he joins up to fight. Sassoon's first novel, though rife with comic characters and a jaunty sense of storytelling, presents his own loss of innocence and the destruction of the country he knew and loved.