The author's debut novel
Faulks, Sebastian ~ A Trick of the Light : Signed By The Author
First UK Printing : The Bodley Head, London : 1984
8vo., black cloth, lettered in silver along backstrip; together in the fine publisher’s black and silver dust wrapper featuring a photograph of the author to the lower panel by Ian Cook (£7.95 net); THE BOOK an apparently unread copy with no significant defects; one accidental pen line to head of p.161 (in the same ink as the author’s signature, possibly a mistake made at the time of signing); the WRAPPER with just a couple of very light scratches and imperceptible creasing to the head of spine. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition of the author’s debut novel, boldly signed to the title page. A Trick of the Light was written and published while Faulks was working as a journalist for The Daily and Sunday Telegraph. The author received the news that his novel had been accepted for publication in a phone-box on Holborn Viaduct. It was in fact, the fourth novel he had written but the first, in his own words, he thought ‘worth publishing’. “I found it extremely difficult to get going as a novelist”, he wrote. “When I wrote A Trick of the Light, I'd already written two novels and I thought if I can't get this one published, that's it. I've given it my best shot, but it's over…it wasn't until my next book, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, that I began to feel confident. In a way it seemed perverse that I should write a book set in a foreign country in a different period, which had a female main character, but actually it was very liberating for me.” It was only after the success of his career-defining Birdsong (published 1993) that he quit his job to work full-time as a novelist. Faulk’s first published work was set in London, and follows Frenchman George Grillet who is tricked by his landlady to carry out what he believes to be an innocent errand - stealing a cassette from a warehouse in the then-underdeveloped Isle of Dogs in East London. The story quickly descends into increasingly nightmarish situations as the protagonist is drawn into an examination of loyalties and allegiances both emotional and political. Although A Trick of the Light was well received at the time, Faulks has since declined to have it published in paperback. ‘There are some okay things in it,’ he said. ‘The action scenes and some of the descriptions of London. But it’s so far from what I went on to write that I think it was a distraction, a kind of throat-clearing. It was an attempt to write something that could get into print after three or four rather “experimental” things in my twenties which ended up in a drawer.’ (Sebastianfaulks.com) Scarce with these attributes.
BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Fine
JACKET: Near Fine
£950