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Fiction Classics

Green Mansions

by (author) W.H. Hudson

illustrated by Keith Henderson

introduction by Margaret Atwood

Publisher
Overlook Press
Initial publish date
May 2018
Category
Classics, General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781468309195
    Publish Date
    May 2018
    List Price
    $40.00

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Description

The timeless classic beautifully restored to its original 1920s format. Lavishly illustrated with 60 drawings by Keith Henderson, W.H. Hudson’s most famous novel, Green Mansions is the book that sparked the nature conservation movement. The inspiration for the movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions stunningly recreates the untouched forests of South America with amazing detail.

After a failed revolution, Abel is forced to seek refuge in the virgin forests of southwestern Venezuela. There, in his “green mansion”, Abel meets the wood-nymph Rima, the last of a reclusive aboriginal race. The bird-girl’s ethereal presence captivates him completely, but the love that blossoms is soon darkened by cruelty and sorrow. Exploring a love somewhere between reality and imagination, Green Mansions is a poignant meditation on the loss of wilderness, the dream of a return to nature and the bitter reality of the encounter between savage and civilized man. 

A master of natural history writing, W.H. Hudson forms a link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentieth-century ecological movement. First published in 1904, Green Mansions owes much of its success to the mystic, near-religious feelings that pervade the story. Hudson’s halting, poetic expressions combined with his descriptions of untouched, natural beauty makes Green Mansions as powerful call back to nature today as it was one hundred years ago.

About the authors

W.H. Hudson's profile page

Keith Henderson has published five other novels with DC Books, The Restoration (1992), The Beekeeper (1990), The Roof Walkers (2013), Acqua Sacra (2016), and Sasquatch and the Green Sash (2018), political essays from when he was Quebec correspondent for the Financial Post (Staying Canadian,1997), as well as a prize-winning book of short stories, The Pagan Nuptials of Julia, 2006). He led the Equality Party during the separatist referendum of 1995, taught Canadian Literature at Vanier College for many years, has sat on numerous boards in Anglo-Quebec including ELAN and the AELAQ, and is currently President of The Special Committee for Canadian Unity. He is completing a critical autobiography with special focus on the works of Edith Wharton.

Keith Henderson's profile page


Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

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