The Dreamers

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc.. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . (price-clipped) [mild bumping to several corners, a bit of soiling to edges of text block, almost-invisible dampstain/very slight rippling to bottom page edges in first part of book; jacket edgeworn and moderately soiled, all edges and folds internally reinforced with brown paper tape (very neatly done and invisible from the exterior)]. Uncommon novel about "some fugitives from war -- two Americans, an Englishman, an Italian, and a decent German baron -- whose lovely escape island [in the Mediterranean] is suddenly occupied by a goose-stepping detachment of Nazis." At first the men agree to be passively cooperative, and thus their pleasant lives are only minimally interrupted -- until the arrival on the island of a British spy. R.L. North, writing in The Saturday Review, opined: "Mr. Clark's mixture of breezy macabre isn't good history, even recent history, but it is a salutary gesture, aimed to cut the Nazi image down to size even at the moment when it seemed largest. It has a little of the flavor of bad taste, as gruesome jokes often do." [+] .