Harriet Said... by Beryl Bainbridge [FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING / 1974]

Harriet Said... by Beryl Bainbridge 

FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING [1974] SIGNET 

Vintage mass market paperback.  Heavy shelf wear to cover.  Binding is strong and underneath the hood is a very nice reading copy!   *signature of orig. owner on top of first page.  

A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.

Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.