Skip to product information
1 of 1

Goldsboro Books

Cork

Cork

by William Boyd

Publisher Ulysses

Genre:

Released:

  • Unsigned
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • HardcoverLimited Edition


Regular price £250.00
Regular price Sale price £250.00
Sale Sold out
Rendering loop-subscriptions
Rendering loop-subscriptions

Available from:

Limited Edition Copies

View full details
  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    One of two-hundred and thirty-six copies hard bound in boards covered with a patterened paper designed by the artist. Of these 236, 150 - numbered 61 to 210 - were printed on Zerkall mould-made paper. This is copy 201.

    A fine first edition. Published without a dust jacket.

About the book

"My name is Lily Campendonc. A long time ago I used to live in Lisbon. . . ." So begins Cork, in which a pragmatic young British widow, proprietor of a cork-processing factory, embarks on an affair with her husband's former office manager, Her lover will meet only once a year, and insists that their encounters be pseudonymous masquerades. For him, this role playing is essential: ''You see, because I am nothing, I can imagine anything. . . . If I were something, I would be unable to imagine.'' Punctuating the story are excerpts from a monograph on the peculiar traits of cork trees. injecting a seemingly dry scientific treatise into a tale of passion. As it turns out, the rare characters of cork''lightness, impermeability, elasticity''and the unusual nature of the love affair have much in common.

Collapsible content

About the Author

William Boyd

WILLIAM BOYD has received world-wide acclaim for his novels which have been translated into over thirty languages. They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet). His novels and stories have been published around the world and have been translated into over thirty languages. He is also the author of a collection of screenplays and a memoir of his schooldays, School Ties (1985); three collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) and Fascination (2004). He also wrote the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist -- the publication of which, in the spring of 1998, caused something of a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. A collection of his non-fiction writings, 1978-2004, entitled Bamboo, was published in October 2005. His ninth novel, Restless, was published in September 2006 (Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006) followed by, Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009), Waiting for Sunrise (2012), Solo (a James Bond novel – 2013) and Sweet Caress (2015). His fourth collection of short stories entitled The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth appeared in 2017. His fifteenth novel, Love is Blind, was published in September 2018. Trio, appeared in October 2020 and his seventeeth novel, The Romantic was published in 2022. The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd (edited by Alistair Owen) was published in 2023.

1 of 4