I'm nominating
Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (the oldest literary prize in Britain). From Amazon:
Quote:
A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war.
In this first novel of the semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the vanishing idylls of 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.
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The novel is available at all the venues for under $10 and it's couponable at Kobo. However, a new edition of the trilogy with a forward by Paul Fussell is being released on May 28 for $9.99, so it's probably worth restraining your enthusiasm for another week.
