Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man.

When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua—a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba—'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' (New Yorker).

Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.