JOHNSTON, Jennifer - How Many Miles to Babylon ? - (1st Ed Hardcover in Wrap.)

You mean to say you HAVEN'T read it yet - Did belong to a library but book and wrapper survived surprisingly well.  Very scarce - Published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1974.  >>>   For such a brief book, How Many Miles to Babylon is a work of startling delicacy and power.   Set in the dying days of the Irish Ascendancy just before the start of WWI and the 1916 Rising ensured that "all changed, changed utterly",  it tells the story of two young Irish men.   Alex, an upper-class Protestant, and Jerry, a working class Catholic, who become friends despite the class divisions between them : a friendship that's both erotically charged and very strong, and which leads to one of the starkest, most powerful endings of any book I've ever read.   -   I first read this as part of my Leaving Cert syllabus, all the way back in 2002.   I adored it and re-read it many times before the year was out; though, for some odd reason, the rest of the class didn't share my affection for it, and my teacher went to great pains to emphasize that there was absolutely nothing homoerotic about this book, at all, whatsoever.  No sir. Oh... Irish convent schools.     (Siria on Goodreads)     >>>   Well, good grief.  How have I got to 48 and never read anything by this woman before.  This book was really excellent.  A poignant account of the trench warfare in Flanders and this would have ranked high just for that,  added to it the story of friendship and loneliness and misunderstood compassion and it shoots ever upward.                    (Mark on Goodreads)