And Now Goodbye

James Hilton

Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

2017

188 páginas

6h 16m

ISBN-13: 9781974041923

Inglês

The Redford rail smash was a bad business. On that cold November morning, glittering with sunshine and a thin layer of snow on the fields, the London-Manchester express hit a wagon that had strayed on to the main line from a siding. Engine and two first coaches were derailed; scattered cinders set fire to the wreckage; and fourteen persons in the first coach lost their lives. Some, unfortunately, were not killed outright. A curious thing was that even when all the names of persons who could possibly have been travelling on that particular train on that particular morning, had been collected and investigated, there were still two charred bodies completely unaccounted for, and both of women. James Hilton was an English novelist. His first novel, Catherine Herself, was published when he was just 20. Several of his international bestsellers inspired successful film adaptations, notably Lost Horizon, which won a Hawthornden Prize; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and Random Harvest. Hilton's books are sometimes characterised as sentimental and idealistic celebrations of English virtues. This is true of Mr. Chips, but some of his novels had a darker side. Flaws in the English society of his time - particularly narrow-mindedness and class-consciousness - were frequently his targets. His novel We Are Not Alone, despite its inspirational-sounding title, is a grim story of legally approved lynching brought on by wartime hysteria in Britain. Hilton lived and worked in Hollywood beginning in the mid-1930s, and won an Academy Award in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver, based on the novel by Jan Struther and one of his later novels, Morning Journey, was about the movie business .