The Military Orchid and Other Novels — Jocelyn Brooke

'Jocelyn Brooke's writing is imaginatively unique ... a great writer.' Elizabeth Bowen Flowers and fireworks, botany and pyrotechny: these were the twin passions of a delicate, sensitive boy growing up before the Great War. Part-memoir, part-imaginative re-creation, these novels evoke a tranquil England where orchids grew wild and undiscovered and a young boy's dreams and disappointments were as simple and moving as a guinea box of fireworks. From the mellow Kentish villages of his boyhood, to the brusque masculinity of the army, by way of painful years at prep school and Oxford, Jocelyn Brooke beautifully captures the torment and the delight of being a constant outsider. Witty, subtle and deceptively simple these three novels were highly acclaimed for the way they captured the unfolding of a melancholy, often painfully sensitive male consciousness, evoking a quintessentially English life.