Lost Empires

by J. B. Priestley and J.B. Priestley

Book Overview

This book has hardback covers.Ex-library,With usual stamps and markings,In good all round condition.Dust Jacket in fair condition. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0586051996
• ISBN13: 9780586051993
• Release Date: September 1986
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Forgotten World...

Before there was radio, before there were movies, before TV, there were the great British music halls, called "Empires" with their Vaudevillian comedies and light drama. In this novel by the English writer J.B. Priestly, the main character, an eighteen-year-old aspiring artist, leaves his rural village after the death of his mother, and travels through the Empire circuit with his uncle, a famous stage magician. Beginning in 1913 and for the most part concluding at the start of WWI a year and a half later, this story brings a by-gone era back to life and shows us how actors and actresses of the pre-film era lived, worked, and in a few memorable cases in this book, how they died as well.

This is Priestley's fiction at its best

"Lost Empires" takes us back into the world of the music hall in England in the early part of this century. Mr. Priestley's gift is characterization and here he takes us on a merry dance around the traps with as fell a cast as ever graced the none-too-genteel provincial stage. It is a book with laughter for itself and for its comic characters and, as always with J. B. Priestley, it has its moments of social satire in which we can all, perhaps, feel we might be at home. Like the longer, sturdier tale, "Good Companions," "Lost Empires" will leave you on a high, having completed a very satisfactory tour of a world long vanished, but whose echoes are still recognizable today. Language and craft, satire and straight-out good fun all abound here. Happily, Mr. Priestley does not leave us dangling for want of more; numerous other works of his are still in print today, which I suppose is the proof of this particular pudding. Not to be overlooked!