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The Signpost (novel)

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First US edition (publ. Macmillan)

The Signpost is a 1943 E. Arnot Robertson novel published by Jonathan Cape, set in a remote fishing village in County Donegal during the Second World War. The main character, Tom Fairburn, is an invalided out Irish volunteer in the R.A.F. who returns to his native Cork after the Battle of Britain to the different world of his neutral home country and becomes involved with another stranger to the village, a French woman.[1][2]

References

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  1. ^ Clair Wills -That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War 0674026829 2007 Page 207 "The main character in The Signpost, a popular 1943 novel by the English novelist E. Arnot Robertson, for example, is an Anglo-Irishman from Cork who has become a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain. Invalided out of the air force for a time he becomes desperate to get away from the highly charged propaganda in London, where strangers treat him with exaggerated concern and respect:"
  2. ^ Saturday Review of Literature 1944 "... critic who calls "home" the two countries of which Miss Robertson writes, England and Ireland, to explain the impact made on him by this pitiful, brilliant, ironic, sardonic novel. The Signpost is a story of broken and restored faith, and I am not sure how far Miss Robertson herself, writing at white heat of the tragic autumn of the first blitz over London in 1940, appreciates the implications of her own alarming fable."