The Hopkins manuscript : a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 9781668003947
-
Physical Description:
385 pages : map ; 22 cm
regular print - Edition: First Scribner trade paperback edition.
- Publisher: New York : Scribner, 2023.
- Copyright: ©1967.
Content descriptions
General Note: | "Originally published in Great Britain in 1939 by Victor Gollancz"--Title page verso. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Retired teachers -- Fiction Poultry -- Breeding -- Fiction Villages -- England -- Fiction End of the world -- Fiction Friendship -- Fiction Moon -- Fiction |
Genre: | Apocalyptic fiction. Science fiction. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Sechelt/Gibsons.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gibsons Public Library | SF FIC SHER (Text) | 30886001115787 | Adult speculative fic hardcover | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 December #1
*Starred Review* Like Sherriff's recently re-released The Fortnight in September (1931), this sf triumph from 1939 dwells in the minutiae and manners of interwar England. While Fortnight takes place over two weeks of annual family holiday, The Hopkins Manuscript unfolds during the anxious months before and the years after the moon, thrown off its rotation, collides with the earth. The novel is framed as a survivor's record of the planetary disaster and Europe's subsequent collapse, the sole remaining artifact from a lost British culture of centuries past. In his remembrances of the months leading up to the collision, the self-important Edgar Hopkins is preoccupied with his prize-winning poultry and social slights from neighbors. Afterwards, he is swept up in the romance of rebuilding and a new friendship with two other survivors, a brother and sister on the precipice of adulthood. Together the three revel in survivalist independenceâgrowing produce, hunting, barteringâunaware of a brewing geopolitical crisis. In this account of an entire world and way of life coming undone, Sheriff masterfully captures the way the graspable and mundane can overpower the incomprehensibility of existential threat. Though written more than 75 years ago about a world without internet or television, Manuscript nevertheless manages to feel entirely contemporary. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2022 October #5
English screenwriter and playwright Sherriff (
Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly.Journey's End ), who died in 1975, first published this droll postapocalyptic yarn in 1939. It has the effect of H.G. Wells rewritten by Evelyn Waugh, and the narrator's reflections continue to resonate: "Today, when all attempt at organised government has long since passed," begins one chapter. The Edgar Hopkins of the title is living out his final days quite happily in a quaint English village, until he learns that the moon is hurtling towards Earth, putting the country's fears about the Nazis on the back burner. A retired teacher, Hopkins decides to record the presumed end of civilization for posterity. A scholarly foreword to Hopkins's journal, published a millennium after his death, explains how Great Britain has remained a "deserted, ghost-haunted waste" because nobody wants to live in its cold, damp climate, and notes that Hopkins possessed both "unquenchable self-esteem and limited vision." Indeed, Hopkins imagines an elevation of his social status via his knowledge of the cataclysm to come. Sherriff's a confident and graceful stylist, and his greatest achievement is keeping his multiple subgenres in play simultaneously. The threat of the lunar collision builds incrementally, pulsing beneath Hopkins's commentary on his fellow villagers' deficient response to disaster. This delivers on multiple levels.(Jan.)