Balcony of Europe

First edition. Large 8vo. Pp. 463, [1 (blank)]. Salmon coloured cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Christopher Cresey.

Author's second novel, following his experimental Langrishe, Go Down (1966). Shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize. The love affair between a young American-Jewish wife and a middle-aged Irish painter conducted at an Iberian coastal village during the fag end of the Francoist regime. A deeply ambitious novel recording the author-cum-artist's quotidian experiences from a series of oblique angles, as opposed to a confined, fixed order.

It has been said that in each of the post-Langrishe, Go Down novels, Higgins having tired of the vanity of mere invention, the main characters are barely fictionalised versions of himself, and there is a continual sense that reality is already an elaborate fiction. A revised version of the novel was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010, where in collaboration with professor Neil Murphy, the author cut back on the Irish material and foregrounded the lovers' tryst.

A past winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Irish Academy of Letters Award and the German Academic Scholarship (DAAD Berlin). "The ferocious dazzling prose of Aidan Higgins, the pure architecture of his sentences, takes the breath out of you. He is one of our great writers." –Annie Proulx