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Introduced by Gavin Wallace
Tunes of Glory
Household Ghosts
Silence
This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty.
Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers’ mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy.
Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway’s favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland’s own turbulent history.
Taken from completed drafts on the author’s desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway’s last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.
”[Tunes of Glory is] … a beatifully executed tragedy of continuing relelvance.”
Marshall Walker
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“… a restless, extraordinary talent …”
F.r. Hart
the Scottish Novel
“A major writer”
Magnus Magnusson
James Kennaway
James Kennaway (1928-68), was born in Auchterarder, Perthshire, where he came from a quiet middle-class background and went to public school at Trinity College, Glenalmond. When he was called to National Service in 1946 he joined the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and served with the Gordon Highlanders on the Rhine. Two years later he went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a degree in economics and politics before renewing his ambition as a writer and working for a publisher in London. Kennaway married his wife Susan in 1951, and something of their turbulent relationship and his own wild, charming, hard-drinking and intense personality can be found in The Kennaway Papers (1981), a book put together by Susan after his death.
Tunes of Glory (1956) was Kennaway’s first novel. It remains his best-known work, and the author himself wrote the screenplay for what was to become a hugely successful film in 1960. His next book, Household Ghosts (1961), was equally powerful. Set in Scotland as a tale of family tension and emotional strife, it was adapted for the stage and then filmed - again to the author’s own screenplay - as Country Dance (1969).
At the age of only 40, James Kennaway suffered a massive heart attack and died in a car crash just before Christmas in 1968. His last work, the novella Silence, was published posthumously in 1972.