The Halt During the Chase by Rosemary Tonks. 1972 Bodley Head, first edition, 165 pages. Rosemary Tonks was a British novelist and poet who famously disappeared from the literary scene. According to her obituary in the Telegraph "Rosemary Tonks, who has died aged 85, was a highly original, worldly poet and novelist who denounced the decadence of her work when she became a fundamentalist Christian and recluse...The rejection of her previous life was so complete that she burnt the manuscript of her last, unpublished, novel in the garden incinerator, and gave away or destroyed valuable objects that she had kept from the travels of her twenties." Halt was her last novel and is a humorous coming-of-age story of a woman in London who falls short of totally losing it.

Condition: Jacket VG- with creases on the front cover, faded watermark, line impression, book VG some wear to boards, ghost of handwritten note on endpaper

"I was that little girl we had been talking about. And the details of her life meant everything to me."