Along with A Glastonbury Romance, Wolf Solent, and Maiden Castle, this modern classic originally published in 1934 forms the quartet that "are just about the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky" (George Steiner, The New Yorker). Drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, Powys creates a striking collection of human oddities -- a famous clown, his mad brother, a naive Latin teacher, a young philosopher, an abortionist, and a wealth of others -- through which he shows his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, and the essential loneliness of human beings. Against the mysterious and haunting background of the sea, the sands, and the stones of the Dorset coast, the secrets of life are revealed through the everfascinating patterns of human behavior.