Armed with Madness

Published in 1928, Mary Butts’s strange and shimmering novel gathers a group of restless young bohemians at a house on the Dorset coast, where they pass their days swimming, drinking, and needling one another. When they pull an old cup from a well, they begin to wonder, half in earnest and half in play, whether it might be the Holy Grail, and the question loosens something dangerous in the group. Butts writes the English landscape and the myths buried under it with an intensity few of her contemporaries matched, and the book moves by mood and undertow more than by plot. Long overlooked, it has been reclaimed as one of the boldest modernist novels of its decade. Free to read in PDF and EPUB.