Back is, according to Jeremy Treglown in his introduction, "Henry Green's most extended attempt to plumb the world of the hunted - and haunted". First published in 1946, it has indeed remained one of Green's most haunting, elegiac novels and one of the most enduring to have focused on the individual human tragedy of the war.

A novel about working-class factory life in Birmingham. Lily Gates keeps house for her widowed father, her timid suitor, Jim, and the patriarch, Craighan, whose house it is. The household slides into disarray as Lily, tempted by the possibility of a more romantic life, elopes with a bolder suitor.

When war breaks out, Roe volunteers for the Auxillary Fire Service in London, and is trained under a professional fire officer, Pye. The two men discover that a quite different link exists between them. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, the relationship between the two men develops.

Few only are the remarks absolutely needed by way of introduction to a work which within itself sufficiently explains and carries out a new method of illustration for the dramas of Shakespeare. This book is the results of genuine study. The results arrived at, though imperfect, are also grounded on real similitudes between Shakespeare and his predecessors and contemporaries; and those similitudes, parallelisms, or adaptations of thought, by whichever name distinguished, often arose from the actual impression made on his mind and memory by the Emblematists whose works he had seen, read, and...