The Cambridge edition of the works of D.H. Lawrence. From the dust jacket:

In setting and theme, The Plumed Serpent is unique among Lawrence's novels. He spoke of it as his "real novel of America", a book he had wished all his life to write.

The "America" of the novel is Mexico in the 1920s, an era of political turmoil. The heroine, Kate Leslie, goes there from Europe in quest of a new life and is drawn into a revolutionary movement to revive the religion of the ancient Aztecs.

The brilliant vision of place, the violent action, the fabrication of rituals and myth for the new religion all combine to make this one of Lawrence's most vivid novels.

This edition establishes for the first time a meticulously edited text based on the manuscript, typescript and proof material, nearly all of which survives. The changes incorporated are many, from restoration of Lawrence's characteristic punctuation to sentences and paragraphs omitted in transmission of text and overlooked in Lawrence's sometimes hasty proofreading.

An ex-library hardback in good condition, reserved to be sent out as a RABCK.

Update (June 19): in the mail as a surprise to the UK to stubee, who has this book on his wish list. Happy trails!

Thanks very much Niora, I look forward to reading this.

EDIT: 26th February 2010 – Started this last night, I read Melvyn Bragg’s introduction but haven’t got stuck into the main text yet.

EDIT: 6th March 2010 - Well I’m getting through this slowly, the first 100 pages or so are quite tedious and I considered giving up on it but I’ve just read Chapter VII "The Plaza" where the book starts to come to life with music and dance!

EDIT: 24th March 2010 - I finally finished this novel, I must say it was a chore and I felt agitated picking it up. It’s long, tedious and boring however there are some quite powerful moments to be found between the pages of nothingness. I imagine that to Kate her journey and adventure was exciting but to the reader there was something lacking, I feel if this was condensed to 200 pages and they stripped out the "setting the scene" scenes it would be a page turner but as it is it struggled to keep me engaged and I almost gave up on it.

I’m giving this to KT-J to read as part of the 1001 challenge we’ve set ourselves, then it’ll be off to da-wildchildz as agreed.

Hmmm this looks fun, thanks Stubee! I'm in the middle of a book at the moment but I'll get onto this soon.

Edit 24/5/10: Well, this took longer than expected to get through. Although the subject matter was quite interesting and parts of the story were well told, on the whole I found the book too long. Half of the sentences seemed to be repeated and the same things were described over and over again in different chapters. I thought the whole book could have been halved and the story would have flowed much quicker. Some of the characters were quite interesting but I didn't really like Kate, she wasn't a very empathetic character.

Overall another one off the 1001 list. I've handed this back to Stubee now.

I received this book as part of a trade on Tuesday but have only just managed to journal it as I was not able to before due to all the bugs. It was waiting for me when I got home from university, thanks stubee for sending to me!

Review coming soon

Left on the shelf.