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At the height of her career, Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was heralded as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms". In The King of a Rainy Country, her semi-autobiographical novel of 1956, Brophy explores the romantic and social malfunctions of an ambiguous young couple, Susan and Neale, as they travel across Europe in search of Cynthia, an ever-present spectre from Susan's schooldays. This modern rendering of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro is as poignant as it is farcical, and exemplifies the range of sophisticated ideas that Brophy examined throughout her life, from pornography, to rationalism, to the sliding scale of sexuality and gender.

A short extract from the novel appears in Issue One of the Coelacanth Journal. We hope to reissue the book in full in 2009.