The Sea, the Sea / A Severed Head

Two major novels--ferociously dark comedies that combine playfulness and profundity--by one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century, in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover.

A Severed Head (1961) is one of Iris Murdoch's most entertaining works, tracing the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, well-to-do London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. The Sea, the Sea (1978) is set in an isolated house on the edge of England's North Sea, where egotistical Charles Arrowby, a big name in London's glittering theatrical world, has retired to write his memoirs, and where his plans begin to unravel when he encounters his long-lost first love and is increasingly besieged by his fantasies and obsessions. Tragi-comic masterpieces, brooding and hilarious, these two novels brilliantly reveal how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves and by our all-consuming need for love, meaning, and redemption.

Introduction by Sarah Churchwell

IRIS MURDOCH (1919-1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy Fellow at St Anne's College for twenty years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than twenty-six novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.

SARAH CHURCHWELL is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. She writes regularly for New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.