In Parenthesis

First published in 1937, this work mixes prose and verse to follow a British infantryman, John Ball, from embarkation late in 1915 through the attack on Mametz Wood on the Somme in July 1916. Ball's battalion, with its Welsh and London mix, moves from training and the trenches to the assault. Jones sets the daily facts of kit, fatigue, and bombardment against allusions to Malory, the Mabinogion, and older wars in the same landscape. The title marks the war as a space set off from ordinary life. The book is an epic of one unit's months at the front, not a staff history of the Somme.

Bound in mid-green cloth blocked and debossed on the cover with a lettered design in cream and green by Ewan Clayton. Endpapers are dark green. Plain dark brown slipcase.