Emma Smith, photographed by Robert Doisneau, for Paris Match, 1948

344p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155231
PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR
AFTERWORD BY SUSAN HILL

When she was 23 Emma Smith went to India with a film unit that included Laurie Lee, who was employed by the Tea Board to write two scripts. On her return to England she published Maiden's Trip, about her wartime life on a narrow-boat: then, 'financially solvent, I took up residence, alone with my typewriter, in a tiny room in the Hôtel de Tournon, Paris.'

The Far Cry was the first book on MacGibbon & Kee's newly-launched list. This 'savage comedy with a vicious streak' (Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler in 1949) describes the 'second passage to India' of 'Teresa, whose elderly, willful father drags her off to spare her from the clutches of her mother…I can think of no writer, British or Indian, who has captured so vividly, with such intensity, the many intangibles of the Indian kaleidoscope; Emma Smith harnessed those intense impressions of her youth to give her story a quite extraordinary driving force' wrote Charles Allen in the Spectator, going on to agree with Susan Hill in her Afterword that the book is 'a small masterpiece…beautifully shaped, evocative, moving and mature.'

The endpaper is a late 1930s English printed linen which Teresa's sister might have chosen for her bungalow from a catalogue sent out from London.