Sinister Street is the masterpiece of Compton Mackenzie’s first period, as an English, rather than Scottish, novelist. It offers not only a wonderfully vivid evocation of late Victorian and Edwardian England but a disturbing account of the hero Michael Fane’s personal development. Mackenzie’s own disposition was sunny, but in this novel there is an awareness of the attraction of evil and the dark side of life which he would seldom recapture in his later work. It was this and the exploration of adolescent sexuality which cause the book to be banned by circulating libraries, the young Cyril Connolly to be beaten for having it in his possession at Eton, and Edmund Wilson, who shared his friend Scott Fitzgerald’s admiration for Mackenzie to declare that ‘the “motif of utter foulness” is one of the most uncanny things in the book; you feel that you are not walking on solid ground, that it may give way at any moment and let you into the sewer’. The germ of the novel may be found in Keats’s observation, quoted in the frontispiece: ‘The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment’.No highlighting or other notes. Pages slightly tanned throughout. Cover in only fair condition: Grants Library sticker half removed on front;gilt lettering on front still fresh though whole of spine area very faded; left side of spine cloth detached from back cover. Hence low price for this scarce first edition.