T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other—and Unclay is his masterpieceNew Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light—Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The village teems with the old virtues (love, kindness, patience) and the old sins (lust, avarice, greed). What unfolds is a witty, earthy, metaphysical, and delicious novel of enormous moral force and astonishing beauty.

Mr Tasker's Gods was T. F. Powys's first novel. Written during the First World War it wasn't published until 1925. It is an unsettling work constantly showing the brutal reality behind the facades. Mr Tasker himself, on the surface, a respectable farmer and God abiding churchwarden is, in fact, 'a brute beast of the most foul nature' Many of the initial reviews were hostile, but that was largely because of the author's treatment of the church. It is under constant attack with the services being described as 'a sort of roll-call to enable authority to retain a proper hold upon the people'. Faber Finds are reissuing six works by T. F. Powys: Mr Tasker's Gods, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, Innocent Birds, Fables and God's Eyes A-Twinkle.

<div><p><i>'A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their passions fair or foul use them to... A country village has a way now and again of clearing out all its inhabitants in one rush, as though it were grown tired of that particular combination of human destinies, and shakes itself free of them as a tree might do of unwelcome leaves..'</i></p><p>The action of T.F. Powys' blackly absorbing, deeply characteristic <i>Innocent Birds</i> unfolds in the English croft of Madder, an ostensibly sleepy and settled milieu where the local people, nonetheless, are prone to acting on impulses and urges that have the power to bring themselves (and others) to ruin.</p><p>'There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "The Silent Woman" because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There...

Mockery Gap is the story of a tiny village on the coast of England, and a series of events arising out of the complex currents set flowing in this simple community by the chance remarks of a chance visitor. This is Mr James Tarr, a gentleman of ethnological pursuits with a desire to impress himself firmly upon people. He exercises this passion on the inhabitants of Mockery Gap, and the effect of carefully-weighted suggestion upon minds given to credulity and superstition makes for far-reaching and devastating consequences. "By all conventional standards, T F Powys is the least modern of writers. His novels and short stories are set in a landscape as far removed as possible from anything smart or urban - a fantastical version of English village life, in which human emotions work themselves out against a backdrop of brooding countryside... Writing as an allegorist or fabulist rather than any sort of conventional realist, Theodore Powys looks not to the present or the future, but to...