Book Details:
Hardback edition published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1960. First
edition.
Sleeve notes:
For readers who respond to a superb story that grows naturally out of the belief that men and women must inevitably choose between good and evil:
Samuel Youd's dramatic, swift-paced novel, Giant's Arrow.
Its setting is London.
Its protagonist, Michael Kelly, faces two dilemmas that challenge his integrity.
The conservative business he inherited from his father is threatened from within by a new director-a ruthless dynamo of a man, unburdened with moral scruples but endowed with a genius for making money.
Michael's marriage, too, is in crisis. His only child was born mentally deficient. Michael is a
devout Catholic; his wife - highly intelligent but emotionally devastated
- is an agnostic. Michael cannot renounce the child; Naomi insists that she remain permanently in an institution.
So Michael is increasingly pulled taut between the moral demands of his faith and the compromises exacted by life. Until the tensions in his home and in his business explode in a powerful climax.
Giant's Arrow deals with civilized, articulate people; with outward and inward conflicts: the Catholic viewpoint vs. the agnostic; opportunism in business vs. old-fashioned integrity; a man vs. himself. It is a powerful story that totally involves the reader in the lives it dramatizes and the controversial questions it
raises.
Book source:
Terry Jenkins
