The Nice and the Good

First edition. Crown 8vo., pp. 349, [1]. Publisher's brown cloth, lettered in gilt to spine; top-edge stained brown. Jacket design by John Ward, priced at 30s net to front flap.

Light soiling and edgewear to jacket, else Fine.

Author's eleventh novel. Shortlisted for the 1969 Booker Prize. A Whitehall civil servant investigates the suicide of a colleague uncovering a world of murder, blackmail and black magic. Influenced by the author's own musings on the philosophical concept of Good, which resulted in her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, particularly the essay "The idea of perfection". In a 1968 interview, Murdoch remarked that The Nice and the Good contains "a certain amount of metaphysical conversation, of a non-technical but definitely philosophical kind". "A feast." –The Guardian