The Violins of Saint-Jacques [Paperback]

Mr. Fermor's elegant rococo fantasy about a volcanic eruption on an imaginary Caribbean island is just close enough to reality to raise a genuine shiver--possibly even a genuine tear. In truth, it is a small timeless masterpiece. --Phoebe Lou Adams,The Atlantic

An NYRB Classics Original

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel displays the same lustrous way with words as his beloved travel trilogy (A Time of Gifts,Between the Woods and the Water, andThe Broken Road), the memoir of his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This slim book starts with the
meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end. Mr. Fermor’s elegant rococo fantasy about a volcanic eruption on an imaginary Caribbean island is just close enough to reality to raise a genuine shiver—possibly even a genuine tear. In truth, it is a small timeless masterpiece. —Phoebe Lou Adams,The Atlantic

The only work of fiction by Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (the decorated war hero, admired travel writer and stylist) is doubly a period piece. Written and first published just over half a century ago, in 1953, its main action is set another half-century before that, in 1902. It is also, in its way, a masterpiece...There is more than a hint of mischief, and indeed humour, about Paddy’s nostalgia for a lost world, and its ethereal afterglow that lives on lãF