Metroland

E-130: Jonathan Cape. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1980. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Jonathan Cape, London. 1980. 176 pages. Signed by Julian Barnes on the title page. First Edition/First Printing. Craig Dodd designed silver lettered DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in bright silver lettered grey cloth. Bookplate present to the reverse of the front board. Text is clean and free of marks, binding tight and solid, boards very lightly rubbed and worn. The adolescent Christopher and his soul mate Toni had sneered at the stifling ennui of Metroland, their cosy patch of suburbia on the Metropolitan line. They had longed for Life to begin - meaning Sex and Freedom - to travel and choose their own clothes. Then Chris, at thirty, starts to settle comfortably into bourgeois contentment himself. Luckily, Toni is still around to challenge such backsliding. Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out." E-130; 7.9 X 5.2 X 1.0 inches; 176 pages .