Carter, Angela. Several Perceptions. London: Heinemann, 1968. 154 pp. Hardcover FIRST EDITION.

Wow, look at this golden beauty basking in the sun! This is a hardcover first edition with (unclipped) dust jacket, designed by Michael English. Several Perceptions is the third novel by beloved writer of the weird, the strange, and fantastic fiction, Angela Carter.

This novel, the second one in the so-called Bristol trilogy, won her the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. She used the prize money to leave her husband and move to Tokio. It was there, she writes, that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and become radicalised." Arigato goizaimasu, Tokio! 

The blurb by Carter's American publisher (Little, Brown) is such a gem I am not even going to try to top it: “Centre stage in Angela Carter's unruly tale of the Flower Power Generation is Joseph - a decadent, disorientated rebel without a cause. A self-styled nihilist whose girlfriend has abandoned him, Joseph has decided to give up existing. But his concerned friends and neighbours have other plans. In an effort to join in the spirit of protest which motivates his contemporaries, Joseph frees a badger from the local zoo; sends a turd airmail to the President of the United States; falls in love with the mother of his best friend; and, accompanied by the strains of an old man's violin, celebrates Christmas Eve in a bewildering state of sexual discovery. But has he found the Meaning of Life?”