The King of a Rainy Country

When 19-year-old Susan takes a job with the shady bookseller across the street from her flat in London’s grotty, bohemian Fitzrovia, she has no plan beyond making the rent till something better comes along. One day, leafing through the erotic books section, she stumbles upon a nude photograph of her old schoolgirl crush, Cynthia. At first she’s shocked, but then memories from seven years ago come flooding back, reigniting her ardor. Neale—her elusive flatmate and not-quite-boyfriend—is every bit as intrigued as Susan, and together they decide to track down the angular beauty.

When they discover Cynthia is scheduled to make an appearance at an international film symposium in Venice, the destitute twosome embark on a package tour to Italy as travel couriers in charge of a bus-load of American oddballs. After various detours, breakdowns, and a raid on the bus’s emergency brandy supply, they finally arrive in Venice . . . and that’s where things get really complicated.

More of a boost “than any Omega 3” (Ali Smith), and every bit as “unclassifiable as the sexuality of its characters” (The Telegraph), The King of a Rainy Country—Brophy’s most autobiographical novel—is an incisive, off-kilter story about figuring out who to love, and how.

“This pitch-perfect novel, an inquiry into romanticism and disaffection, is witty, unexpectedly moving and a revelation again of Brophy’s originality. Entirely of its time, it remains ahead of itself even now . . . in its emotional range and its intellectual and formal blend of stoicism and sophistication.”

—Ali Smith

“One of the strangest and wittiest British writers of the past half century . . . A comet in her day.”

—Terry Castle

“Brigid Brophy [was] one of the most original and engaging writers and critics of the last century, and it is an enormous pleasure to discover this early novel, first published in 1956 . . . Brophy writes with great wit about the uncertainty of youth. It’s sharp, funny and clever, and as fresh as new paint.”

—The Times

“There is nobody quite like her, no one who sees the world quite in her original way.”

—A.S. Byatt, The Times Literary Supplement

“Part of Brophy’s brilliance is that the queerness doesn’t seem suppressed or coded; instead, it seems to be so much part of the way things are that it hardly needs separate mention. She embeds her schoolgirl romance in a quixotic quest narrative, an existential search for the unrecoverable . . . Her style [is a] revelation . . . Her metaphors are persistently strange and wondrous . . . She should be read with her more famous contemporaries such as Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch for the breadth and incisiveness of her intellect, but she should also be read with sui generis stylists such as Henry Green and Kay Boyle.”

—Stacey D’Erasmo, from the Foreword

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) was an acclaimed novelist, essayist, critic, and activist. She championed gay marriage, prison reform, pacifism, and vegetarianism, as well as campaigning tirelessly for the rights of both animals and authors. She published nine novels—of which The King of a Rainy Country (1956) is her second—as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ronald Firbank, her formidable intellect unhampered by being sent down from Oxford before she could take her degree.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2009, and won the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012. She is currently a Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University in NYC.

The King of a Rainy Country • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022851

Apr 1, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 38

5" x 8.5" • 280 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022868