HOBAN, Russell. Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2010.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Peach moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [xiv], 235 pp. Expanded edition, including the author's afterword, notes, and glossary. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) was born in Pennsylvania, worked as an illustrator and advertising copywriter, moved to London in 1969, and lived there until his death in December 2011 — the same year in which this Easton Press edition was released. He wrote prolifically across multiple genres, most famously for children (The Mouse and His Child, the Frances series), but he is best known to adult readers for Riddley Walker, which he described as the most difficult thing he had ever written and which is widely regarded as one of the most formally radical novels of the twentieth century. He almost certainly signed the Easton Press edition in the last year of his life. Anthony Burgess, whose own A Clockwork Orange provides the closest analogue in the tradition of linguistically invented dystopian fiction, called Riddley Walker "a remarkable book, which imprisoned me in its atmosphere and wouldn't let me get out."

The novel is set in the county of Kent, in England, two thousand-odd years after a nuclear catastrophe has reduced civilisation to an iron-age subsistence economy. The survivors have lost all knowledge of what destroyed the world before theirs; what remains is a garbled mythology, a travelling Punch and Judy show that carries fragmented memories of pre-catastrophe science and politics in the form of allegory, and a system of "connexion men" — individuals whose function is to interpret the mythology for their communities. Riddley Walker is twelve years old when he becomes a connexion man following his father's death, and the novel is his account of his attempt to understand what the shows mean, what happened in the world before his, and what the people around him are trying to rediscover.

The language in which Hoban tells this story is the novel's central achievement. "Riddleyspeak" is English as it might plausibly have devolved over two millennia of illiteracy and oral transmission — phonetic, contracted, oddly beautiful, and capable of unexpected depths of meaning in its distortions of familiar words. "What ever it is its some thing as wants to get it self togethr" might be a statement about entropy, or consciousness, or the nature of civilisation, or all three simultaneously. Reading Riddley Walker requires an initial investment of effort and delivers an experience unlike anything else in the literature. The Expanded Edition presents the complete text alongside Hoban's own afterword, notes, and glossary.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000557