Free fall

With an introduction by John Gray Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell transfigured from his ordeal, and begins to realise what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. But did those accumulated choices also begin to deprive him of his free will? 'A fiercely distinguished book.' Frank Kermode 'It is one of those rare books that should be read by people who don't normally read novels at all. It will stand, I belive, as one of those books against which other books are measures.' Tribune