Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly. With no regrets, Sara reviews her changing fortunes, remembering the drudgery of domestic servitude, the pleasures of playing the great lady in a small provincial town, and the splendors and miseries of life as the model, muse, and mistress of the painter Gulley Jimson.

The charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well?Originally published in 1944, The Horse's Mouth is acclaimed Irish author Joyce Cary's third instalment in his First Trilogy and sequel to Herself Surprised (1941) and To Be A Pilgrim (1942). It follows the adventures of Gulley Jimson, an artist who would exploit his friends and acqu...

The adventures and misadventures of a young Nigerian negro in the British colonial civil service.A temporary clerk, still on probation, Mr Johnson has been in Fada, Nigeria, for six months and is already much in debt. Undaunted, he entertains on the grandest scale, with drums and smuggled gin. Not only that, he intends to pay a small fortune for his wife...

An American visitor and uninvited guest in the village of Nok, Marie Hasluck is an irrepressible anthropologist who believes that she has found the Kingdom of Heaven in the forests of Nigeria. There, to her eyes, the Birri tribesmen make love and war unfettered by the constraints and complications of Western civilisation; a state which Marie finds enviable and which she does her best to emulate.However, all is not well even in this pagan paradise: white prospectors are staking claim...