Unclay

New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest. First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light—Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The village teems with the old virtues (love, kindness, patience) and the old sins (lust, avarice, greed). What unfolds is a witty, earthy, metaphysical, and delicious novel of enormous moral force and astonishing beauty.

"Delightful.", "Very few 20th-century authors have the knack of writing convincingly of first and last things. T.F. Powys is one of them. ", "Powys’s quaint village brims with eccentrics and sinners, and gentle humor exists alongside a brutal frankness about power and sex. It is hard not to succumb to the strange, animating energy in Powys’s allegorical tale about Death’s redeeming qualities.", "An esoteric genius: his books are puzzling, engaging, and illuminating, glowing with a gentle, a half eerie light, humane, ironic and wise. Powys gives pleasure and delight, unique and surprising music.", "Grimly brilliant."

T. F. Powys (1875-1953), a novelist and short-story writer, belonged to one of the most remarkable literary families (his brothers include John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys). He was a man who rarely left home or traveled by car, who claimed to love monotony, and who “never gave so much as a sunflower-seed for the busy, practical life.”