James Kennaway

Mr Alfred, M.A.

James Kennaway

Tunes of Glory

James Kennaway

Introduced by Allan Massie.
Lt. Colonel Jock Sinclair is a rough talking, whisky drinking soldier’s soldier, a hero of the desert campaign who rose to his position through the ranks. Colonel Barrow, an officer graduate of Oxford and Sandhurst, had a wretched war in Japanese prison camps. But he has come to take command of the Battalion he has long admired, the one that Jock Sinclair has served in since he was a boy. In the claustrophobic world of Campbell barracks, a conflict is inevitable between the two men and a tragedy unfolds with concentrated and ferocious power.
James Kennaway served in a Highland regiment himself, and his feeling for ‘tunes of glory, for the glamour and brutality of army life gives added authenticity and humour to this, his first and most famous novel. He died in a car crash at the tragically early age of forty.

Household Ghosts: A James Kennaway Omnibus

James Kennaway

Tunes of Glory Household Ghosts Silence
This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty.
Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers' mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy.
Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway's favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland's own turbulent history.
Taken from completed drafts on the author's desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway's last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.