R.C. Sherriff was born in 1896. He worked in an insurance office until he joined the East Surrey regiment early in World War I. In 1917, he was severely wounded at Ypres. Journey's End, based on his letters home from the trenches, was an enormous success and became a classic. In the 1930s, Sherriff went to Hollywood to write the script for The Invisible Man, and subsequently worked on the script for Mrs. Miniver, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and many other successful films. He wrote several novels, including The Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript before his death in 1975.
This wonderful novel should powerfully resonate with readers whose consciences are troubled by inequality and climate change... Like Kazuo Ishiguro, Sherriff is a master at framing a story through the narrator's circumscribed point of view. --Alec Nevala-Lee, The New York Times Book Review A triumph... masterfully captures the way the graspable and mundane can overpower the incomprehensibility of existential threat. Though written more than 75 years ago about a world without internet or television, The Hopkins Manuscript manages to feel entirely contemporary. --Booklist, *starred review* This delivers on multiple levels... It has the effect of H.G. Wells rewritten by Evelyn Waugh, and the narrator's reflections continue to resonate... Sherriff's a confident and graceful stylist. --Publishers Weekly I loved this book, by turns funny and tragic ... It moves between abject despair and good old-fashioned British stoicism with ease. Magical --Jeff Noon, Spectator A glorious comic novel about the end of the world... RC Sherriff's novel, like all great speculative fiction, rests not on its plausibility, but on the glimpses it shows us of our own face... The book crackles with juxtapositions of the everyday and the extraordinary... What a weird and brilliant talent he had... Hopkins...was his finest hour. --Andrew Hunter Murray, The Times (UK) Spectacular, skilled and moving and supremely and alarmingly relevant to our life today. --Fay Weldon, The Observer (UK) Intensely readable and touching. --Sunday Telegraph (UK)