Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (Paperback, Main)

Boys and Girls Come Out to Play was Nigel Dennis's first acknowledged novel. It makes use of his years in America where he worked for eighteen years. It can be described as a satirical adventure story in which the main character, Max Divver goes to Poland in the spring of 1939 to report on the crisis. As well as exploring the character of American 'liberalism', he novel explains Max Divver complicated attitude to European life and politics. Starting in the stifling atmosphere of home and professional life among the New York intelligentsia, it crosses the Atlantic to a Polish hotel, portraying as it goes, in addition to numerous minor Americans and Europeans, Divver's frustrated wife and child, the expatriate American engineer who is fated to be Divver's nemesis, the engineer's young and desperate wife, and the all-powerful Mrs Morgan of the progressive "Forward," whose neurotic son accompanies Divver to Poland and inherits the task of recording Divver's life and fate for the benefit of the younger generation.

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""When first published in 1949, "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play" ("A Sea Change" in the U. S. A.) won the Anglo-American novel award.